[atait]

Our web team will be working on site files in separate local workspaces. Changes will be deployed to a central development server so changes can be viewed and tested prior to committing to CVS. Can this be accomplished with the MyEclipse deployment tool configured to deploy to a <custom location>? The custom location being a map to the shared deployment directory on the dev server.

What are my options for setting up a shared development instance that will be used by multiple developers to deploy and test their changes?

Client: Windows XP
MyEclipse: 3.8.4
Eclipse: 3.0.1
Dev Server: Linux Enterprise 2.6
App Server: Jboss 3.2.3

Thanks

Allen

[Riyad Kalla]

Can this be accomplished with the MyEclipse deployment tool configured to deploy to a <custom location>? The custom location being a map to the shared deployment directory on the dev server.

Yes this is exactly the type of scenario we envisioned when we added this functionality.

What are my options for setting up a shared development instance that will be used by multiple developers to deploy and test their changes?

Just as you explained it, central JBoss install on a remote server, every developer as the deployment dir locally mounted on their machine. I would encourage you to let each developer deploy to their own webapp “dev1” “dev2” “dev3”.

[atait]

Thanks for the quick reply. I haven’t found an explanation of the deployment options: <externally launched> and <custom location>. Can you provide information on what each provides and where they should be used?

Thanks again

Allen

[Riyad Kalla]

Allen,
Both of the options do the same thing, the reason we added two was to ease the first-time use of the dialog, so people would have a higher hit rate of finding what they were looking for in the drop down. If we just used “Custom Location” or “Externally Launched”, we can think of use cases for each where the user would be confused if they were trying to do the operation that was NOT there. So we just created 2.

[atait]

It seems there is a restriction to sharing the same deployment location. Once one developer has set up a deployment to our shared dirve, a second will get an error when attempting to deploy. I see you recommend that we set up separate deployments for each developer (i.e. dev1, dev2, etc.). This will be complex for us to set up and mange given the complexities of the International web site we are managing. Is it possible to share the deployment directory across developers? For what it’s worth, these developers are the view programmers, primarily working with JSPs.

[Riyad Kalla]

Allen,
First let me explain why that precaution was put in place and then possibly suggest a (akward?) solution.

1) When we started offering custom location deployment, the deployment tool kept the same behavior for “Remove” that it had always had, more specifically it would erase the directory and contents that you had deployed to. Thinking of a normal deployment (c:\tomcat\webapps\myapp) this was never a problem.
2) Some users setup up custom deployment locations to C:\ and to their Desktops. This was fine until they went to remove the deployment, given the behavior from Step #1, you can see what happened next (entire hard drives and directories were wiped out as the deployed location was removed).

Because of 1/2 we decided to make custom location deployments only occur to NEW directories, that way we would never be in the situation of erasing sysytem directories like what had happened. Unfortunately this causes a problem with your current setup, so I would propose the following solution, luckily you should only ever need to do it once:

1) Setup the deployment on each machine, after setting it up on each machine however, delete the directory from the server that was created, and then move to the next machine adding the deployment. Each time the deployment tool will see that the directory isn’t there, and will successfully create the deployment. This has never been tested internally so I don’t know how MyEclipse will behave with this. If this doesn’t work there are a few other things to try… like using packaged deployment and optionally going back to having every developer have their own web app or ultimately having every dev have their own install of JBoss on their local machines (memory isn’t too terribly expensive if it comes down to that).

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