On Jun 15, 2006, at 12:07 AM, Matt Hogstrom wrote:
I was talking to a set of folks that are looking at Geronimo and
one of the unique things they are interested in that Geronimo has
and others do not is the plugin support.
They're view of the world is that their developers use Eclipse as
their IDE and like the WTP work that has been done so far (koodos
Sachin). What they would like the ability to do is from Eclipse be
developing and testing and testing an application and when they get
it right is to export that application in as a CAR (not from the
Admin Console) directly out of Eclipse.
This I think would be very cool and very valuable. At minimum, I
foresee a context menu action on a J2EE project that simply pops up a
"Export CAR Wizard". However, we'll need some flexibility in the
server to allow this. The biggest issue is that we're not dealing
with a J2EE Structure, and copying resources into the .metadata as an
exploded ear is not always good. In a test-environment, (in an ideal
world), there should be at most one copy of a resource, the resource
that the user is modifying and interacting with. So just like the
config-store resolve method we'll need some type of hook to be able
to resolve the containing ear project and its module projects.
While on the subject, there is a huge restriction as far as deploying
the the "eclipse-aware" config-store. It only works with stand-alone
modules. I'll like to see some support in the runtime for modules to
be delegated to be resolved in the EARConfigBuilder. So please give
some thought on how this could be done.
There were several things that they asked about:
One item was sensitivity to releases. From their perspective this
would be useful if the CAR could tolerate several versions of
Geronimo. If its only good for a specific version that limits the
usefulness.
Integration with Eclipse rather than having developers work the
Geronimo console. It didn't seem as compelling.
They would like the Geronimo infrastructure to be able to
distribute CARs throughout a cluster.
They had several other thoughts about G that would make it
interesting as well but they are Geronimo server related so I'll
post in another thread.
Aaron, thoughts?
Matt
-sachin
