This page intentionally left blank Download from C H A P T E R 4 Configuration Files Explained In the previous chapter, we talked about favoring convention over configuration. In this chapter, we discuss what to do when you need to override convention and tell the system or your application how to behave. This chapter describes exactly how to do that in the WebSphere sMash environment. This chapter gives you the “tools” and the know-how to configure the WebSphere sMash environment and your applications. Configuration in WebSphere sMash can be roughly categorized as affecting either the application or the environment, as shown in Figure | This page intentionally left blank Download from C HAPTER 4 Configuration Files Explained In the previous chapter we talked about favoring convention over configuration. In this chapter we discuss what to do when you need to override convention and tell the system or your application how to behave. This chapter describes exactly how to do that in the WebSphere sMash environment. This chapter gives you the tools and the know-how to configure the WebSphere sMash environment and your applications. Configuration in WebSphere sMash can be roughly categorized as affecting either the application or the environment as shown in Figure . The list of files shown is not exhaustive it merely shows the files we will be discussing in this chapter. We defer discussion of some types of configuration such as database PHP and security to chapters that deal specifically with those subjects. In this chapter we focus on creating custom configuration data for your application and on configuring the runtime environment. Application Configuration The following sections concern the settings that are specific to a single application. The files and settings involved are located within the application directory tree. Global Context and WebSphere sMash applications consist of a collection of related but separate modules that respond to application and user request events. All data for these events is stored in a global data structure called the Global Context GC . Although we discuss the Global Context in detail in Chapter 5 Global Context it is important to understand its role in configuration. The Global Context is a URI-addressable tree with predefined root nodes called zones. Each zone has a particular purpose. One of these zones is used for application configuration. It is called naturally the config zone and entries in this zone are addressed using the pattern config path . 63 Download from 64 Chapter 4 Configuration Files Explained The .