Originally posted by john guthrie:
so right now i am finding this book kind of frustrating
I'm sorry that you're finding the book frustrating. I'll acknowledge that the book is less than perfect (it's funny how many things you spot *after* the book goes to print). But hopefully we've not made too many goofs. If we did, please let me know and we'll attempt to address them.
In the meantime, let me address some of your concerns.
- Merge points and the purpose of the mergeDir attribute are discussed in more detail in section 2.6. By the time you get to listing 4.1, I assumed that you had read the earlier sections of the book and, in the interest of not repeating myself, I chose not to explain mergeDir again. In short, merge files are a way to inject your own hand-written code into the generated code--mergeDir specifies the location of the merge files.
- I just tried the "wecomefiles" attribute. And you're right. It doesn't work. I think I know why, but I'll need to get back with you to let you know how it should work.
- The "distributable" attribute, when set to "true" inserts a <distributable/> entry in the generated web.xml. Per the DTD's documentation, this entry "indicates that this web application is programmed appropriately to be deployed into a distributed servlet container." Sorry that the entry is too terse. I falsely assumed that the brief description would be enough.
Again, sorry for any confusion. If you have any further questions, I invite you to post to the Author's forum on Manning's site (www.manning.com/walls) and I promise to get to the asap.
[ January 28, 2004: Message edited by: Craig Walls ]
[ January 28, 2004: Message edited by: Craig Walls ]