I'd like to see us generate a source + prebuilt artifacts (WAR/EAR +
deployment plans) as a downloadable assembly off our Downloads page.
Requiring users to checkout the Samples source from SVN is not friendly
to those that don't have a svn client installed (Windows and some
default Linux installs) and requiring them to build the Samples just so
they can look at the deployment plans requires more work than most
average users will be willing to spend.
-Donald
Joe Bohn wrote:
I too agree that a new user should not need to deal with plugins
initially unless they really want to.
I think they can already do this today ... but perhaps not as cleanly as
we would like (and not without the user seeing the word "plugin").
The important thing (as David mentioned) is that they need to build the
samples first. I don't think that is an unreasonable request. In fact,
until our recent release of samples, a user had no choice but to build
the samples locally as there were no published artifacts.
Once a user has built samples they can do the following if they don't
want to leverage the plugins:
- Install any necessary prereqs (such as the sample-datasource). There
are a number of ways to do this for the datasource (if necessary) ....
documented in the wiki. The easiest is to install the plugin but a user
doesn't have to go that route. See
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC21/sample-applications.html
- Install the specific sample artifact built locally using the archive
and the appropriate plan from the
<sample>-tomcat/target/resources/META-INF/plan.xml (or jetty equivalent).
It's a little difficult to get the plan from that location (esp since
the user must choose the correct plan for the server image they want to
use) but I'm not convinced it is any worse than having to pull it from a
maven repo.
It would be ideal if we could:
- Produce a single plan in the build that could work with either tomcat
or jetty to accompany the ear/war
- Put that plan in a more "user friendly" location (but somewhere under
target rather than src).
- If we do anything more, we must keep the content from polluting the
src tree. Part of the work necessary to get samples to a state where
they could be released was to remove the special build processing that
ended up adding various items into the src tree which caused problems
for the maven release process.
Joe
David Jencks wrote:
On Oct 12, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Forrest_Xia wrote:
Generating standalone and deployment-ready war or ear ball will make
geronimo
samples more easier for first try, and will improve user's use
experience.
For currently generated war or ear of samples 2.1.2 release, user should
supply an external deployment plan.xml to make it deployable. I think it
will lead user bad use experience when first trying a simple sample
war or
ear ball.
Of course, I believe geronimo plugin is a good stuff to try those
samples,
but it takes time for user to build up geronimo plugin knowledge.
For an experienced JEE developer, he/she is used to consider a .ear
or .war
ball is a ready-to-deploy artifact. Suppose that, If they finally
find they
need to learn more about geronimo in order to make a simple sample's
.ear or
.war deployed succussfully, what feeling will they have?
I think well considering user's use habit and ensuring first-try success
experience is very important to attract new user to stay with our JEE
server
and consequently work with it.
So I would suggest we add back geronimo specific deployment plan into
packaged war or ear balls. What do you think of this?
Well, the _only_ javaee compliant location for a plan that I know of
is _outside_ the javaee artifact... see jsr88. Any time you include a
plan inside a javaee artifact you are using a proprietary extension.
I'm not familiar with what other container recommend, are you?
Most of the samples do need a plan to indicate at least the dependency
on the samples datasource. I'm not really convinced that hiding this
plan inside the javaee artifact will make it clear to users that the
dependency is required.
I'm not completely opposed to including a plan if we can provide some
automated way to make sure it is at least as functional as the related
plans in the plugin subprojects. Do you have any ideas on how to
assure this? Is it worth the extra effort?
Another possibility might be to publish the completed plans from the
plugin subprojects as additional attached artifacts with say
classifier "plan". That way the plans would be available through
maven just as the javaee artifacts are. To me the main problem with
deploying the javaee artifacts is that you have to build the plugins
anyway to get the completed plan, and making the plans as available as
the javaee artifacts might solve this problem.
thanks
david jencks
Forrest
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