1 Reply Latest reply on Mar 6, 2003 8:51 AM by bgw2

    Loading web app classes from ClearCase directory ?

    bgw2


      I'm porting a large web application from Weblogic to JBoss 3.0.
      There are over 2000 Java class files in the web app (the product
      of 16 developers banging away at it for 2+ years !). These are all
      deployed under WEB-INF/lib, along with a bunch of third party
      libraries (as all good web apps should be deployed 8^).

      What I'd like to do is to get the class files from a development
      directory, where they're compiled from the source code, instead
      of getting them from the web app jar file. Then hopefully, I can
      recompile a class, redeploy the web app, and see the changes
      immediately (right ?).

      How can I do this ? Some of the things I've tried:

      o call newClassLoader() on the LoaderRepository MBean from within
      the jmx-console, passing an argument like "file:/X:/path/to/classes/dir".
      This appears to start to work, except that JBoss tries to enumerate
      all the classes under this directory, and with 2000+ files, this
      ends up taking a long time. And I'm not convinced this is the right
      approach anyway, because this will add a new class loader to the
      loader repository, which is above the web app class loader.

      o add file:/X:/path/to/classes/dir to the URL attribute of the MBean
      for the deployed web app. This seems to make the web app stop
      working; it just doesn't respond any more, and I've noticed
      there is a warning message displayed in the server log saying,
      "[jbossweb] WARNING: ClassPath should not be set for WebApplication"
      ...hmmm, so I guess this isn't too good a thing to do, right ?

      This is code that's checked in the ClearCase, and is available
      in a view on Windows NT.

      This works under Weblogic 5.1 because the X:/path... directory
      can simply be added to a "weblogic.class.path" system property,
      which the Weblogic class loader references.

      What's a good way to do this under JBoss ?

      Thanks in advance,

      Bruce

        • 1. Re: Loading web app classes from ClearCase directory ?
          bgw2


          Oops, minor correction to my original post:

          > o add file:/X:/path/to/classes/dir to the URL
          > attribute of the MBean
          > for the deployed web app.

          It's the "classPath" attribute of the web application
          MBean that I'm setting (not a "URL" attribute, which
          does not exist on this MBean).