Development environment
Hi there,
I was just wondering how you guys out there are developing with Seam? Are there any tricks or special tools/plugins you are using?
I am using eclipse for coding, but the build is driven via maven2. This means that in order to see a simple change in say an xhtml page I have to rebuild the whole ear file and redeploy it (via cargo start/stop). That's takes a fair bit of time and is far from optimal.
I am trying for days to have some sort of war:inplace working within in webapp subproject. So far without success. My idea was to build and deploy the ear as normal (via cargo), but at the same time deploy the webapp also standalone in a separate tomcat instance running on a different port. For this to (possibly) work I am adding additional classes (via cargo) to the standard webapp classpath. It looks something like this:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<wait>true</wait>
<container>
<containerId>tomcat5x</containerId>
<zipUrlInstaller>
<url>
http://www.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.20/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.20.zip
</url>
<installDir>
${tomcat.install}
</installDir>
</zipUrlInstaller>
<output>
${project.build.directory}/tomcat.log
</output>
<log>
${project.build.directory}/cargo-startup.log
</log>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>jboss</groupId>
<artifactId>
jboss-ejb3-client
</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>
javax.persistence
</groupId>
<artifactId>ejb</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>jboss</groupId>
<artifactId>
javassist
</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>concurrent</groupId>
<artifactId>
concurrent
</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>jboss</groupId>
<artifactId>
jboss-ejb3-all
</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>jboss-seam</groupId>
<artifactId>
hibernate-all
</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</container>
<configuration>
<home>
${project.build.directory}/tomcat5x
</home>
<properties>
<!--<cargo.jvmargs>-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8888,server=n,suspend=n -Xms128m -Xmx512m</cargo.jvmargs>-->
<cargo.logging>high</cargo.logging>
<cargo.servlet.port>
9090
</cargo.servlet.port>
</properties>
<deployables>
<deployable>
<location>
${basedir}/src/main/webapp/
</location>
</deployable>
</deployables>
</configuration>
</configuration>
</plugin>
I also add the ejb jar itself to the lib directory of the webapp, because Seam has to be able to find the annotated 'named' entities at startup ( I think). Of course the actual beans are still deployed in the ear file. I also changed all interfaces to be remote. Uhh, pretty complicated I know. I am not even sure if this can work at all. Has anyone a comment to this approach? Basically Seam starts up and it makes calls to the ejbs deployed in JBoss. Some pages even work, but others just refuse to work.
Another apporach would be to use Tomcat only for development and deploy the webapp together with an embedded JBoss. Something along this: http://docs.jboss.org/ejb3/embedded/embedded.html.
Of course the whole war:inplace thing might be not worth the effort at all and there is a much better way of doing things. Any ideas/comments?
Cheers
--Hardy
