[Rob]

Does ME use ANT to build the WAR files it deploys
when you use the Project Deployments tool to
Manage Deployments?

I would like to edit that ANT script so that it will
archive my WAR and copy it to a number of
locations…

Thanks,

Rob.

[Scott Anderson]

Rob,

With 2.7/3.7 GA, Ant won’t be used at all. The reason we abandoned it was that Ant won’t traverse Eclipse like files properly so it made using Ant a ‘non-starter’ for supporting a more flexible project structure.

In the 2.8 timeframe, we’ll be supporting more flexible project structures and are seriously looking into ways we can allow some level of customization of the deployment mechanism.

[Rob]

That’s great for rapid development, but it adds a level of overhead
for a production environment where a build script must also be
developed and maintained. In my plain old eclipse environment,
the same build script could be run from the command line, no
matter if I’m in Eclipse, Windows CMD prompt or Linux command
line…

Will future ME releases generate ANT scripts, or will I have to run
ME to build my WAR / EAR files for each release I want to do?

I guess the right question is how will ME support Software Configuration
Management issues, if doesn’t use an open and standard framework
for building?

@scott wrote:

Rob,

With 2.7/3.7 GA, Ant won’t be used at all. The reason we abandoned it was that Ant won’t traverse Eclipse like files properly so it made using Ant a ‘non-starter’ for supporting a more flexible project structure.

In the 2.8 timeframe, we’ll be supporting more flexible project structures and are seriously looking into ways we can allow some level of customization of the deployment mechanism.

[rwells@emcien.com]

I would just like to join in on this thread as this same question arose for my team, and is an important issue to us. We are currently evaluating MyEclipse.

We develop prepackaged applications that are sold to customers where they are handling deployment to the app server, and we support deployment to multiple app servers. We have no direct access to our customers production environments. So, our QA team manually deploys the generated WAR files to the QA test environments just like our customers would manually deploy their production environments.

We would want the generation of those WAR files to happen nightly in an automated fashion, and ideally the build scripts that my developers are running for testing in the development environment would be the same scripts that generate the WAR files for the QA team. This helps eliminate the “It worked on my machine” syndrome.

Being able to run the build process in a headless unattended fashion is a major plus for us. I don’t really care if it’s ANT or something custom, though a standardised method is always a good thing.

In the mean time, if I wanted to create a standalone WAR file, not deployed to an APP server, using the gui in MyEclipse how would I go about that?

Thanks for your time.

[Scott Anderson]

Good comments all. What we tend to recommend to clients is that their build scripts for QA and Production should be 100% decoupled from those used for development. They should pull all source directly from the repository, freshly compile everything, and then package it as needed for production/QA. The advantage to this independence is that your now not dependent on whatever development tool(s) your developers choose to use. For nightly build management, typcially something like Anthill (http://www.urbancode.com/projects/anthill/default.jsp), AntHeap (http://antheap.sourceforge.net/screenshots/choosesettings.jsp.html), or another product is used.

As I stated earlier, while we would’ve like to use Ant for our development packaging, we could not since it won’t respect Eclipse link files. This limitation would’ve kept us from supporting the flexible project structures needed to make MyEclipse work with existing projects.

Please don’t take my comments to mean that we don’t want to help in some way, but we all really need to be sure we keep development decoupled from QA delivery and production build/test. Let’s keep the ideas coming, all are welcome.

In the mean time, if I wanted to create a standalone WAR file, not deployed to an APP server, using the gui in MyEclipse how would I go about that?

There’s an open enhancement request for this that will be part of the 2.8/3.8 product release.

[Rob]

This is nice, but unless I maintain a working directory that is separated from my repository (and in the case of clearcase, this is not allways true since your view is ‘on top of’ the repository), I can not take advantage of ME J2EE build/deploy.

I would have to maintain one file structure that supports ANT and another file structure that supports ME….

…On a side note, why does the ANT task for building WARs does not like the web.xml file to be named “web.xml”…?

[Riyad Kalla]

…On a side note, why does the ANT task for building WARs does not like the web.xml file to be named “web.xml”…?

this is something I’ve wondered for so long, that I build my WARs with the <jar> task… kind of a PIA if you ask me…

was this changed in Ant 1.6?

[rwells@emcien.com]

Scott,

Thank you for the rapid replies. I agree that having the build system decoupled from dependance on the development tool used by devlopers is a good thing. However I would rather the development tool be able to make use of and intereact with some sort of external build system. I can understand though that this is a daunting requirement. Perhaps it’s more of an issue with Ant not beeing flexible enough.

I’ll take a look at the two systems you mentioned to help deal with the issues we have.

what’s the time frame for the 2.8 release, btw?

Roy Wells

[Scott Anderson]

what’s the time frame for the 2.8 release, btw?

End of February for 2.7 GA. A couple weeks into March for the first 2.8 beta.

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