Sorry, I didn't see these questions initially...
1) I tried using Eclipse, as I've always did, for developing. What IDE
do you suggest?
It's a matter of opinion. Certainly Eclipse is very popular. IDEA is
also pretty popular around these parts. NetBeans has a bit of a
following. The only one my experience makes me recommend never touching
is IBM's RAD. I actually think these were the specs for RAD:
* Take Eclipse
* Bloat the hell out of it
* Add features that do little for the developer
* Make sure it puts all sorts of proprietary things in the project
directories so that switching IDEs will be a painful task
* Sprinkle in a liberal helping of random bugs throughout
And you have RAD!
I think most good IDEs these days have Struts-specific hooks, so I'd say
find one you like and go with it. Sounds like you already know and like
Eclipse, so might as well stick with it.
FYI, I personally don't use an IDE at all 98% of the time. I'm a big
fan of UltraEdit, Ant and a command prompt :) Directory Opus is the
other indispensable tool in my arsenal. I do keep IDEA installed
because sometimes something comes up that an IDE truly is helpful for,
but a majority of the time it slows me down more than it helps, that has
been my experience.
jEdit is a fantastic free alternative to UltraEdit by the way, and in
fact has more IDE-like features via plug-ins that UltraEdit does. If
you want something between full-blown IDE and text editor, jEdit is a
great option.
2) I noticed that each time I did a simple change I had to build with
ant to package a .war and then restart Tomcat to recognize it. Tomcat
takes 20 secs to load which is absolutely unbearable. Is there a more
agile way of doing things?
The way I develop is that I have the webapp in exploded format right in
Tomcat's webapp directory. I don't create and deploy WARs unless its to
our remote WebSphere servers (and in that case it's actually an EAR). I
edit the app directly in Tomcat's directory structure. My build scripts
have tasks to start and stop Tomcat. And I have the build mapped to a
hotkey in UltraEdit. So, for me, I hit a single key and the app
rebuilds, Tomcat is started, and I even pop open a browser window
pointed at the starting page (and I have another hotkey to attach JSwat
to Tomcat for when I need a debugger).
However, this still incurs the startup time as you mentioned, and also
it isn't an incremental build (one of the things I miss out on by not
using an IDE). But it *is* still better IMO. Of course, this is only
for classes, JSPs and such recognized immediately as you would expect.
Tomcat does offer some configuration options to auto-reload a context.
Some exploration of the user's manual should point you in the right
direction. I've personally never had a big problem with waiting 20
seconds or so per build, but those options might help if it does bother you.
3) Is MyEclipse worth it?
I can't speak from experience, although I have checked it out and
thought it looked useful (just because I don't now use an IDE doesn't
mean I'm not constantly checking out what is available). But I have
heard good things about it from a number of people.
I think this is it.. for now :-) I'll be forever in debt for your kind replies.
Fire away if anything else comes up... I think you'll find the Struts
community has a great many good people who are eager to help :)
--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
AIM: fzammetti
Yahoo: fzammetti
MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Java Web Parts -
http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net
Supplying the wheel, so you don't have to reinvent it!
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