What is the glassfish alternative to context.xml

Question

I am used to configuring web application in context.xml, including jdbc resorces, and application configuration parameters.

Under glassfish, what is considered the standard place to store application configuration information?

We used to store it in the context.xml file as follows:

<Resource
url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db?useUnicode=true&amp;characterEncoding=utf8"
username="username"
name="jdbc/db"
password="secret"
auth="Container"
driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
maxActive="5" maxIdle="2" maxWait="10000"
removeAbandoned="true"
type="javax.sql.DataSource"
/>

<Parameter name="application.url" value="http://localhost:8080/News/" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="smtp.server" value="smtp.example.com" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="smtp.port" value="25" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="smtp.from.address" value="admin@example.com" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="smtp.from.name" value="Site administrator" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="list.name" value="DEV" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="temporary.folder" value="/tmp" override="false"/>
<Parameter name="authentication.type" value="LDAP" override="false"/>

Answer 1

It sounds like you want "glassfish-resources.xml". You can create JDBC and database pool resources, JavaMail resources, etc there.

http://javahowto.blogspot.com/2011/02/sample-glassfish-resourcesxml.html

Answer 2

For all who are looking for a way to set context parameters in Glassfish - it is possible.

While Glassfish does not support a context.xml file, you can still set/override web app context parameters. There is the asadmin sub command set-web-context-param to set these. The values will be stored in your domain.xml - the will not be lost on redeploy of the application.

Synopsis (from documentation link above):

set-web-context-param [--help] --name=context-param-name 
    {--value=value|--ignoredescriptoritem={false|true}} 
    [--description=description] application-name[/module]

Resources such as JDBC datasources can be configured with asadmin, too, or you can use the web gui of glassfish. All that information will be stored in the domain.xml file.

Answer 3

In your app's web.xml, per Java EE specs.

Here is tomcat's blurb about context.xml.

You can configure named values that will be made visible to the web application as servlet context initialization parameters by nesting elements inside this element. For example, you can create an initialization parameter like this:

<Context ...>   ...   
<Parameter name="companyName" value="My Company, 
    Incorporated" override="false"/>
</Context>

This is equivalent to the inclusion of the following element in the web application deployment descriptor (/WEB-INF/web.xml):

<context-param>   
    <param-name>companyName</param-name>  
    <param-value>My Company, Incorporated</param-value>
</context-param>

Answer 4

You could use JNDI properties instead. I believe that Glassfish uses a jndi.properties file.

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-4336/gcpge?a=view

Answer 5

Turns out the answer is there is no alternative to the section in tomcats context.xml.

It turns out that the element is a tomcat specific thing generally not supported by other app servers such as glassfish.

As far as I can tell there seems to be no simple/sensible alternative apart from manually configuring database resources through either GUI or command line interfaces.