[Erik Mattheis]

We have standardized on MyEclipse and find it to be the most comprehensive IDE for most of the development work we do. One area we find it to be a bit lacking is in deploying projects to local servers. For many applications we need to manage complex packaging issues (e.g. – including app-server-specific files, importing resource adapters, runtime-dependent JARs, etc) when deploying applications to the server. We use Ant scripts to handle this for releases, but it would be very nice if we had the flexibility of Ant within the MyEclipse deployment so developers can seamlessly deploy apps locally the way they get deployed in production.

The existing mechanisms (e.g. – merging dependent projects, placing exported libs in ears, etc.) get us tantalizingly close to our goal. The main areas of concern at the moment are being able to specify the name of the deployment archives (I’ve reported this before) and being able to selectively include/exclude files from the workspace within a deployment. MyEclipse uses the project name as the name of the archive for EJB and EAR deployments which never matches our naming convention as we try to use descriptive project names and concise archive names. We often need to selectively include projects that should be merged on deployment – some dependencies in Eclipse are compile-time only and we don’t wish to duplicate a JAR that is provided by the server. Also, we need to be able to include arbitrary files from other projects (e.g. – resource adapter archives) into the deployment archive and we can’t do this with the standard lib-export mechanism.

[Loyal Water]

We use Ant scripts to handle this for releases, but it would be very nice if we had the flexibility of Ant within the MyEclipse deployment so developers can seamlessly deploy apps locally the way they get deployed in production.

I’ll make a note of this feature request. Thank you for your feedback.

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