All,
I was after some feedback on how people structured their WEB (war)
applications when using WSAD/Eclipse and maven for development.
My directory is structured as follows:
/WebProject
/src
/java
/test
/java
/WebContent
/WEB-INF
/classes
/lib
/target (maven generated)
As with jar projects, I defined all dependencies in the pom and these are
reflected in the .classpath file
A simple example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
<classpathentry kind="src" path="src/java"/>
<classpathentry kind="src" path="src/test/java"/>
<classpathentry kind="var"
path="SERVERJDK_50_PLUGINDIR/jre/lib/rt.jar"
sourcepath="SERVERJDK_50_PLUGINDIR/src.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="var" path="MAVEN_REPO/j2ee/jars/j2ee-1.3.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="var"
path="MAVEN_REPO/junit/jars/junit-3.8.1.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="var"
path="MAVEN_REPO/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="output" path="WebContent/WEB-INF/classes"/>
</classpath>
This compiles fine. The classes are written to my
WebContent/WEB-INF/classes directory.
BUT - If I run this application using a WebSphere Test Environment (WTE)
server, it will fail because it can't find the log4j classes.
The WTE uses the WebContent directory as an exploded war. WTE expects
utility jars to be available to the WAS classloader, usually from the
WEB-INF/lib directory. If I put the jars in the lib directory, I'm
effectively maintaining the dependencies twice (in the pom and in
WEB-INF/lib).
Of course, when building using maven, the exploded war is created in
/target, including dependency jars added to /WEB-INF/lib. That all works
fine, especially on a continuous integration server.
If I could get WSAD to use the /target/webapp directory in the WTE, that
would solve the problem, but I can't.
Therefore, using maven in a development environment seems to require
deploy the generated ear for each test iteration. This loses much of the
power of the WTE.
So what do other people do? I've extended war:war to add dependencies
defined in the pom to the WebContent/WEB-INF/lib directory. But this
requires maven war:war to be run before using WTE for the first time. That
doesn't feel right.
The whole thing doesn't seem to fit well for war projects (great for
jars). I'm still experimenting but I thought I'd ask for help!!!
I hope this makes sense :-)
Al.
Digital Union UK
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