Plans for the JBossIDE Core toolset

[mculpepper]

Hey guys..

I'm starting this thread to discuss how we should move forward with the Core toolset (this will be a part of the JEMS Tooling Effort Proposal). Here are my initial thoughts:

- We need to be 100% integrated with WTP. We should be integrating the whole bundle from now on.
- Things we can completely throw out the window:
1) J2EE XML Descriptor wizards (replaced by WTP wizards)
2) J2EE component wizards (servlet/taglib/etc) (replaced by WTP wizards)
3) All JBossAS related functionality (replaced by new AS adapter)
4) Deployment functionality (replaced by WTP Publish/new AS adapter)

- Things that can probably be thrown out, but might require some additional code:
1) XDoclet functionality. We should be able to replace this with the WTP XDoclet stuff, but from reading in the forums it seems like their functionality is not quite as nice as ours. We might have to "embrace and extend" WTP's stuff here.

- Things that should stay:
1) Packaging functionality. This is the only major "tool" I see sticking around in the Core toolset. I would like to heavily update it's usability and L&F as well. A complete rewrite may not be out of the question here.
2) Core APIs. There are some really good utility classes / functionality that we should be using across the board more often that i think should be the *real* focus of the JBossIDE core.

[mculpepper]

Some other thoughts:

- Our JSP pre-compile stuff should be moved into a Tomcat plugin proposal. I've started a thread over in the JBoss/Tomcat integration dev forums to generate discussion on such a plugin (or if it's even feasible):
http://jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=78265&start=-10&postdays=postDays&postorder=postOrder&highlight=highlight

- We should have a migration wizard for all 1.x users to 2.0 so that upgrading is painless for the new AS adapter. This would probably entail a few things:

1) Migrate 1.x-style launch configurations to 2.0-style ServerTools configuration
2) The possibility to convert Java projects to WTP Web/EJB projects

- We should also provide a migration tutorial for our 1.x users so they can fully embrace / use webtools to it's full extent. A simple 1-to-1 mapping of old 1.x functionality to WTP equivalents would be a good start.

[maxandersen]

Lot of work, but +1 ;)