[cas-dev] thoughts on org.jasig.cas.web.init.SafeContextLoaderListener..

[Andrew Petro]

Scott,

The wrappers for the Spring context loader and dispatcher servlet were 
implemented in order to soften the experience for a quickstart CAS 
adopter.  As of when they were created, the experience for a CAS and 
Spring newbie in modifying a Spring bean declaration XML file and 
introducing a fatal misconfiguration (say failing to close a tag) would 
be that context initialization would fail entirely.

The thought was that a more friendly newbie experience on having 
introduced a fatal misconfiguration is for the CAS application to 
successfully start and present an error user experience advising the new 
deployer of what might be wrong.

When the Yale folks gave the getting started with CAS JA-SIG 
pre-conference seminar, this behavior did in fact make the hands-on CAS 
customization exercises go more smoothly.

I sympathize with the "additional options cause confusion" problem but I 
wonder why the thorough commenting in web.xml indicating that they are 
replacable and what they might be replaced with is insufficient to help 
people understand that they are optional and to make an informed choice 
among the options.

web.xml file as exposed by FishEye:

http://tinyurl.com/2kwe7t

Andrew

Scott Battaglia wrote:
> We currently wrap the Spring ContextLoaderListener and DispatcherServlet 
> in order to show a "pretty" error message for a FATAL start up, which in 
> general should be caught during testing (or within 30 seconds of 
> deploying to production).
> 
> Does anyone see any benefit to these? We disable them at Rutgers (why 
> have the extra method calls).  I have also seen them cause confusion as 
> people think they can't replace them and they are necessary for CAS to 
> function.
> 
> Any objection to removing them?
> 
> -Scott
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> cas-dev mailing list
> cas-dev at tp.its.yale.edu
> http://tp.its.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/cas-dev