The Eclipse Web Tools Project comes pre-packaged with server adapters
for many application servers, including Tomcat, Weblogic, WebSphere,
JBoss, JOnAS. Since we've moved the Geronimo plug-in development over
to Apache, we're no longer included with WTP. Users must be aware that a
plugin exists for Geronimo and they must go install it themselves. Even
though this is not a problem and trivial to do this, we've essentially
lost this so called "free advertisement". Also WTP does not ship any
runtimes, only the server adapter for those runtimes. So in the
Geronimo case, users not only have to manually point to the update site
and install the plug-in, but they must also install the application
server itself. It would be much nicer if we could get tighter
integration with WTP so users can avoid any manual intervention at all.
So I was on a call last week with some members of WTP and what came out
of the meeting was the following feature proposals....
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=110453
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=110455
So to summarize what the following will accomplish...
Users will download only WTP. Once launched they will be able to go to
"New --> Server". Geronimo will automatically be pre-listed as one of
the choices. If chosen, WTP will go out to the Geronimo update site
without users having to point to it, and pop up the license and will
install the plugin as well as download and install the Application
Server!! The plugin will then automatically be configured for that
install image.
This I think will help integrate Eclipse WTP very nicely with Geronimo.
From our end there will be minimal coding that will need to be done from
the plugin site. The main piece of work for enablement will be to set
up an update site not only for the plug-in, but for the server as well.
If anyone has any objections to make the server available for download
through the Eclipse update manager site, let me know. Otherwise I will
work with the Eclipse team to get this set up.
Sachin.
