Create navigation menu dynamicly based on deployed jars.

Question

Hi,

I am just investigating the idea of this so have no example code. I've been digging around on the web but I'm not really sure what I should actually be looking for so I'm not finding much. So I thought I'd ask and see if anyone knew if a) This is possible. b) How I should do it. (Or at least what I should be looking to learn about to do it.)

I'm building a web app using JSP pages on the client with a JBoss server running J2EE, in the middle there is a tomcat web server.

Basically the app contains different sections that will be rolled out over time as they're developed and also customers may be using different combinations of sections. The tidiest way of deploying this I can think of is to build each section into it's own jar. Then depending on the combination of sections that are relevant for the customer, install only the required jars on the JBoss server for deployment.

To support this I'd like the client navigation menu to only show the available sections based on what is deployed on the JBoss server. Is it possible for my servlet to find out what is deployed on the server? I'd like the solution to be as 'dumb' as possible, i.e. I don't want to tell it what to look for, (other than a prefix to identify our jars), as I don't know yet everything we might build.

My current solution is to have a table in the database to hold a list of the installed sections. But this is going to require update scripts etc during install and I'm sure we should be able to do this by just deploying jars on the server.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I do something similar by configuring a "Plugin Directory" setting for my application. It then scans that directory regularly for Jars. It looks for specific metadata in the manifest to determine whether the Jar is actually a valid plugin, and what class to load from it (the static initializer of that class registers the plugin with the application).

Then all you need to do is place a new Jar into that directory to add its functionality.

Answer 2

You could add this information to the MANIFEST.MF file and then enumerate all files in your webapp (see this answer for how to list all manifests) when you start.