HP's Bluestone group have just put their new j2ee/web/app server up for free download and use http://www.bluestone.com/products/hp-as/default.htm
What is interesting about this product from an ant perspective is that it also comes with a new ant centric deployment tool 'RadPak', which is a kind of xml, jar/war/ear file editor with ant integration built in. They've also extended the ejb tasks and added a new one to actually do the deployment to a local or remote app server. Even though it is a GUI based deployment and packaging tool, its use of ant means that it can also be used to host the entire build and test process, which is kind of handy. The ant UI consists of an XML tree editor , with a text editor mode, and then you can list and run the targets on that file. There must be a fancy lister as it animates which target it is executing as it goes through the tree. There are also some wizards to generate template ant files for EJBs and things -the wizards themselves look like ant files. I like this tool for a number of reasons -it is a good tool for war editing and things for operations people, who dont need a full IDE -it shows how ant support is going mainstream into commercial products, and evolving UIs in the process -vendor supplied EJB and deployment tasks. Need I say more? Like all automated tools (eg netbeans) it has some niggles, most niggly of all is how it restructures your XML file and reorders attributes on <target> so name goes last. Oh, and it is currently 1.3 only. You can download RadPak separately from the App server -just go through all the registration process; it is a big install file (30MB!), so do it from a fast connection. -Steve -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
