Hot Deploy with Seam 2.0.1 GA, Eclipse Europa, JBoss Tools 2.0.0 GA, and Glassfish

[fsat.f_satyaputra.yahoo.co.uk]

Hi All,

I'd like to ask if anyone has managed to get the Seam 2.0.1 GA hot deployment working on Glassfish, using Eclipse Europa, JBoss Tools 2.0.0 GA, and Glassfish Eclipse plugin.

The hot deployment works out of the box with Tomcat, Eclipse Europa, JBoss Tools 2.0.0 GA, and Tomcat Eclipse plugin.

However the Glassfish plugin redeploys a new EAR file or WAR file after every little change, so essentially the hot deployment options no longer works. I was wondering if anyone has managed to work around this, would you be able to share some hints or tips please?

Thanks,

Felix

[sander]

Glassfish does not have the ability to hot reload seam pojo's so that is not possible (at least as far as I know, hope that would come someday)

For the xhtml files: make sure they are in the build path and then set the output dir to where the app is deployed on the server. deploydir is very usefull for this.
This way you don't use the eclipse plugin for deploying the war. Use touch .reload to reload the app (also ensures the war not redeploying after every save)

[pmuir]

Do you know why it doesn't work to hot reload seam pojos on glassfish?

[sander]

No clue, I'm not that experienced with app server's. Only thing I could think of is a difference in classloading.

I must say I haven't tested it on JBoss but according to the blog's that should work.

If you could figure it out, it would be great! Then an update on the eclipse glassfish plugin so it doesn't do a redeploy everytime and a nice dev speedup could be achieved.

[sander]

Oke, couldn't resist to seek where it came from so I did some debugging.

In HotDeploymentStrategy the HOT-DEPLOYMENT-DIRECTORY-PATH is set to WEB-INF/dev. I'm deploying/building to a normal structure so the components will be in WEB-INF/classes.

If I build to the /dev dir hot reloading works fine. And since classes directory is not searched for so no hot reloading.

In conclusion this leads to a request:
Can you make it so that the directories being searched are configurable. Also making it possible to add multiple directories.

[larshuber]

As described at the beginning of the topic I don't believe it is the plugin who starts the deployment.
I think I had the same annoying problem and it is easy to stop redeploying on every little change.

In eclipse you have the option to activate Build Automatically in the menu Project. Every time when you save a file the actions in the explode.launch file are executed. There is one line which is responsible for that

<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.ant.ui.ATTR_ANT_AUTO_TARGETS" value="explode,buildtest,"/>

I changed explode,buildtest into clean,war,buildtest. Like that you have auto build, proper tests and no annoying redeployments on every save. To restart the Application just execute the ant command restart.

Hope this is the reason and it works for you.

[pmuir]

Sander Schoot Uiterkamp wrote on Apr 02, 2008 08:35 PM:


If I build to the /dev dir hot reloading works fine. And since classes directory is not searched for so no hot reloading.

Yup - this is documented :-p

In conclusion this leads to a request:
Can you make it so that the directories being searched are configurable. Also making it possible to add multiple directories.

There is an open JIRA issue for this. But beware, you will never be able to point this at WEB-INF/classes.

[sander]

Pete Muir wrote on Apr 06, 2008 11:56 AM:



Yup - this is documented :-p

Your right, should have looked better only saw the inrelation to blog and thought it would work ...

Pete Muir wrote on Apr 06, 2008 11:56 AM:


There is an open JIRA issue for this. But beware, you will never be able to point this at WEB-INF/classes.

To bad ...

Isn't it possible to do a full debug mode or so, more like tapestry and let the filter do the classloading of all classes ?

[pmuir]

Sander Schoot Uiterkamp wrote on Apr 06, 2008 12:14 PM:

Pete Muir wrote on Apr 06, 2008 11:56 AM:


There is an open JIRA issue for this. But beware, you will never be able to point this at WEB-INF/classes.

To bad ...

Isn't it possible to do a full debug mode or so, more like tapestry and let the filter do the classloading of all classes ?

What advantage would this give you?

[sander]

Hmm good one.

Well would probably solve

• the hot-deployable components will not be visible to any classes deployed outside of WEB-INF/dev

But just deploy everything in /dev and it is fixed.

Other thing is that you can use maven to build and then do remote debugging.
But since you'd need the project in debug mode (and so just another build config) making another profile with path's would solve the need for this.

When working on lib's they could also be exploded to /dev resolving that problem.

Actually the only advantage might be a little less configuration, but since this is only very little and you'd have to do it once it doesn't matter much. So I'd have to say none...

Well on this point I guess I have to say thanks for being my rubber ducky  ;)

[pmuir]

Sander Schoot Uiterkamp wrote on Apr 06, 2008 08:59 PM:


Well would probably solve

• the hot-deployable components will not be visible to any classes deployed outside of WEB-INF/dev

Not with the current impl of hot deploy (the hot deployable classloader is known to Seam, not to the container). I don't know a way of removing this restriction. And if you pointed the hot deploy  classloader at WEB-INF/classes you would just get the same classes loaded by both the Web classloader and the hot deploy classloader.

[fsat.f_satyaputra.yahoo.co.uk]

Thanks Lars, Sanders, and also everyone who responded to this post.

For the time being, since we are developing simple webapp, we just use tomcat for dev. Glassfish is used from testing onwards.

But I will certainly look at Lars' suggestion. I can see the plugin launching Ant, but I wasn't sure where the build file is located until reading Lars' post.

[sander]

Are there any changes planned for the hot deploy ?

I'm currently building all my classes to /dev. But my entities are not getting loaded/detected by the container since they are also in /dev.

Christian describes in JBSEAM-1634 that he uses a custom parent class loader. However he does not describe the classloader there or anything how to get it to work.

Can you say anything about when this will change ?
It is really annoying to place my seam components in a separate build path with separate maven build configs

[pmuir]

It's not going to change any time I know of. You will never be able to hot redeploy entities (as that would require hibernate to boot, which is slow). I don't think Christian's issue is relevant to entites.

Split out your entities and actions (this isn't a bad idea from a separation of concerns pov anyway). If maven is so useless as to not allow you to do this, then complain at the maven guys, not us ;-)

[sander]

Pete Muir wrote on Apr 10, 2008 10:50 AM:


Split out your entities and actions (this isn't a bad idea from a separation of concerns pov anyway). If maven is so useless as to not allow you to do this, then complain at the maven guys, not us ;-)

Using packages will also do that but your right ;)
I'll think i'm gonna try maven assembly to split of my action packages. I'll get back to this if i have this working properly