Hi,
In developing an open-source portal, GridSphere,
www.gridsphere.org we've tried to make the installation as painless as possible by providing custom ant tasks which create the database during installation. However, this assumes a default database location and when users try to change this, they have problems.
To be even more clever, I have the idea of having our gridsphere servlet redirect to an admin servlet if no database is found... the admin servlet would allow the user to select database settings like connectionURL (or use a default) and then create the database from the webapp as well as reinitialing the SessionFactory with new properties, etc. Is this possible? I would really appreciate any sample code or pointers to other references for help.
Thanks very much, Jason