Matt,

I first have to commend you on doing such a great job with appfuse.
I was really starting to feel lost and wandering trying to come up
with an organized build process and finally I found a great start (I
say a start because I want to offer some suggestions).

First of all, the idea of having a supporting library repository and
a cooresponding lib.properties file which maps those libraries is
ingenious.  I was spending a lot of time upgrading my jar files when
a new version of struts or hibernate was released because I could
not remember what I needed, what version I had and why I needed that
jar file.  Now I just drop the new jar file into my lib repository,
update my lib.properties file and the next build includes the
updated file.  Awesome.

Changes:

Here are some of the changes I think need to be made to make the
appfuse build process more extensible.

* create a consistent src.dir property so that the path to the
  sources directory is not hardcoded throughout the build process

* make use of the start, stop and reload tasks from catalina-ant.jar
  instead of undeploying, restarting and deploying the jar file each
  time.  

* Make a spot to specify supporting tag library jar files

Finally, I wanted to bring up an concept I am still stuck on.  As it
stands now, I run my application using a context xml file in the
tomcat webapps directory and a custom docBase.  This way, after
building my war file I extract it to a directory of choice and
reload the application (prevents having to redeploy the war file).
However, my issue is that I have to go through the whole build
process each time a make a change to a jsp, graphic or stylesheet
file.  This just seems dumb, even frustrating for my designer, who
has to ask me to rebuild so he can see his changes.  I am trying to
work this one out.  To resolve it the build directory has to also be
the repository for the jsp/js/graphics files.  I guess it could be
done by using a mask of **/*.jsp **/*.css **/*.jpeg **/*.jpg
**/*.gif **/*.png and so on.  If I can figure this one small part
out I will be really cooking.  I have already overwritten my changes
too many times to count since I like to see the change right away,
so I make the change in the deployed directory, then rebuild and
overwrite those changes.  Oops.  Maybe I am just trying to do
something too specific.  Who knows, shed light?

Dan

-- 
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Daniel Allen, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.mojavelinux.com/
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There is no such thing as a casual knowledge of xslt, either 
you know everything about it or you are sitting in the creek.
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