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4.2+

}Proposal for better/simpler bundling. See [MAGNOLIA-2686@jira] for status.

{status}
h2. Rationale

The current bundling of Magnolia has several drawbacks:
* it is big (Magnolia itself isn't exactly lightweight, and bundling 2 webapps with Tomcat make it a whooping 65mb\!)
* it doesn't provide an easy entry-point for non-tech users:
** on Windows, if using the installer, there are shortcut icons to start/stop, etc; this is however only available on windows and with the EE. (although we could of course also provide the installer with the CE)
** on all other platforms or with the CE, users have to know how to open a shell, what it is, etc; and probably generally have to fiddle around with JAVA_HOME and so on (again, the installer provides a way around this)
* the installer doesn't provide much added value, other than setting the JAVA_HOME variable in the startup scripts (which is not uninteresting)
* even once installed and started, the entry barrier is still quite high - "firewall" issues on OSX, and concepts are not clear: both instances of Magnolia are probably perceived as a single application (started with a single shortcut/command). Consequently, it might not be clear why two instances are actually a feature of Magnolia, nor that they could (should) be deployed on separate servers/machines for production use.

h2. Implementation

We should reduce the number of artifacts: standalone (for evaluation and simple use) and webapp (for deployment in own server, production)

h3. Standalone

* one single file to download; double-clickable. ({{java \-jar magnolia-standalone.(j\|w)ar}})
* minimal gui on startup (or shell console or options if no screen is available, obviously), asking for (for example):
** magnolia_home ? (defaults to current folder)
** http port (defaults to 8080)
** instance name/contextPath ? (defaults to magnoliaAuthor?)
** is author/public
** subscriber address (defaults to demopublic.magnolia-cms.com?)

* starts an embedded appserver ([Winstone|http://winstone.sourceforge.net/], Jetty, ...) with ONE instance of Magnolia.

We could get inspiration from Hudson for embedding. Custom classloading / packaging might be necessary.

This probably depends on the ability to deploy read-only war files: [MAGNOLIA-2170@jira]. (i.e the having all config and extract files outside the webapp)

Although not inter-dependent, [Concept Module downloader updater] would also help reducing the size of the bundle \!

The concept of the 2 instances (authoring vs publication) would possibly become more visible and understood by new users, compared to the single tomcat running the 2 webapps.

h3. Webapp

* well, we have that already, but we might want to think about a solution for avoiding the ones specific to weblogic, websphere, ...

h2. Additional ideas (2009-06-23)

* auto-discovery of other instances (Bonjour?)

* "this is a public instance, you need to start an author instance as well"

* "this is an author instance, where is your public instance?"

* while this might be worth a separate feature on its own, this popped up while discussing the standalone bundles - use Bonjour/ZeroConf for subscribers discovery/configuration ?

** [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software])

** [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking

]
** [http://www.zeroconf.org/

]
** [http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/bonjour_ch08/index.html

]
** [http://jmdns.sourceforge.net/]