Redeployment of EJB-jar and WAR

[mindgame]

Using RHDS beta 1 with JBoss AS 4.2.1GA to development a project which consists of a EJB-JAR file and a WAR.

First I deployed the EJB-JAR file followed by the WAR file. But each time, modification is done to the EJB-JAR file, it is necessary to restart the JBoss server. As you can imagine, this is a very time consuming not to mention extreme boring experience. Is there a way which I can speed up the development process to avoid a server restart each time a class file has been modified?

Thank you for your time.

[mindgame]

Forget to mention, my EJB-JAR file contains Seam 2 components.

[amitev]

I heard something about "restart project" functionality

[maxandersen]

touch the application.xml and it jboss will redeploy just those.

we will add that into RHDS soon.

[mindgame]

Max, thank for the hint. Does that mean I have to deploy as EAR? Currently, I am deploying the EJB-JAR and WAR separately. Is this an unsupported deployment approach? Thanks.

[maxandersen]

afaik the same things go for any archive in jboss. just touch the descriptor in an exploded deployment and it will trigger a restart.

I like EAR better since things are then located in the same place.

[mindgame]

Trying using RHDS to deploy an exploded ear file to JBoss AS, but the war and ejb-jar file inside the ear are zipped. Is there a way to have war and ejb-jar package exploded as well?

Returning to my ejb-jar and war file being deployed separately, the issue is that when I redeploy the ejb-jar by 'touching' the ejb-jar.xml file, the ejb-jar is redeploy automatically to the JBoss AS, but the website will no long work after the redeployment. Error messages similar to the following are noted,

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: object is not an instance of declaring class
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
 at org.jboss.seam.util.Reflections.invoke(Reflections.java:21)
 ... 89 more

Unfortunately, even after I redeploy the war file, but touching the web.xml file, the web application still does not function. This problem is only solved when I restart JBoss AS. Any hint as how to resolve such an issue? Many thanks.

[maxandersen]

hmm....i'm not sure about b1 but the current build at least has these exploded.

But i'm still considering the WAR deployment scenario to be the best bet at the moment, EAR still has issues.

[mindgame]

Max,

I had downloaded and tried the latest nightly build of JBoss Tools. A EAR project was created which includes a web (JSF + Facelets) and EJB (EJB3 + Seam2) components.

The deployment of the EAR in exploded format as you mentioned earlier and the application was successfully deployed to JBoss AS 4.2.1 GA. The problem is when I made changes to the web and EJB component, the changes were not propagated to the JBoss server. Again the only way which I can see the changes on the browser is to republish the EAR. Can you recommend some ways which I can accelerate the development process. Hate having to republish the entire EAR (which takes 20-30s) each time changes was made. Many thanks.

I noted the default Seam project, one can dynamically change the CSS, message bundles as well as xhtml page and these changes were automatically propagated to the JBoss AS. How come it is not happening with my deployment configuration with EAR?

[rob.stryker]

There were soem bugs in publishing. These should be fixed now as of a few hours ago. I think they should have made it into the build.

[rob.stryker]

Actually let me clarify:

Unless the autopublish thread is turned on, autopublishing does not work. The autopublishing flag is in window -> preferences -> servers

There were some bugs in *how* the incremental publishing was going, which was causing other problems.

Either way, my fixes tonight fixed only the *how*, not the *when*. So if you update a file, in the servers view or JBoss Servers view, you'll still need to click the publish icon (which will perform an incremental publish and run *very* quickly).

Further fixes will come tomorrow.

[maxandersen]

Rob's tell me he worked hard last night fixing this, but autoredeploy is still not being triggered correctly yet. It will be fixed soon though ;)

[mindgame]

Rob,

thanks for the hint. Just tried the build 20070921xxxxx, the publishing as well as automatic file system copy upon file modification to the JBoss AS deploy directory is now a success!!

Is it actually possible to update message bundles during runtime? I tried to change the message bundles content but JBoss AS fail to detect and use the latest version. It seems the content from the bundles are resided in server cache or memory. But I remember it was possible to dynamically change message bundles file content inside the default Seam 1.2 project generated by JBoss Tools and these changes was automatically reflected with a refresh of the browser.

In addition, something unrelated to JBoss Tools, when opening a CSS file, noted the following error messages,

org.eclipse.wst.css.core.internal.document.CSSModelImpl cannot be cast to org.w3c.dom.Node

THANKS!!

[mindgame]

Thank you for the hard work Rob and the rest of the JBoss Tools team!!

[maxandersen]

hi mindgame,

update message bundles during runtime ?
AFAIK this is a limitation of ResourceBundles since they are cached forever.

How that could have worked earlier with the projects created by jboss tools I don't know. Any hints would be good ;)

Could you report that issue about the css file ? And please include the full log of that error message + which editor you actually end up having open on the css file.

thanks