isn't this a generic design issue, rather than a jakarta-apache issue?
It sounds like the solution you want lies in modularizing your project design so that the lots of little apps have an identical framework as your target one big-app. So:
The application framework can be compiled in one central place and distributed as binary code to the people doing the subprojects (shouldn't have any technical problem here since the point of Java is to be cross-platform). when you want to make you one big app, you don't have to do anything except plug your subprojects into the same framework instance.
At 12:57 PM 1/23/01 -0600, you wrote:
We've got a J2EE project that like most is composed of multiple "sub-projects", each sub-project being a fairly autonomous set of JSPs/Servlets/EJBs etc. but with some sharing of components across sub-projects (and a lot of linking between projects in the generated HTML code).
Currently each sub-project is developed within its own web application, which makes it easy to test and deploy all on its lonesome. But for production purposes we like to deploy this as one big web-app. (Among other reasons, this minimizes the number of sessions floating about, and saves us trips to the data store to recreate session information.) To do this, we use a fairly complicated Ant script that can build each sub-project as an isolated web-app or build all of the web-apps as an integrated whole. This is workable but seems like a big hassle. It seems like there ought to be a better way.
It occurs to me that others must have encountered similar problems with overlaying sub-projects onto what for all intents and purposes is a single web application, and I wonder what if any solutions you have come up with. If anyone has a more clever solution, or would like to compare notes, either on-list or off, I'd welcome your input.
Thanks,
- Rod Waldhoff
