Hello TomEE/OpenEJB-Comunity,I would like to know which ways you prefer for developing JEE-Applications with TomEE and maybe standalone OpenEJB Server in combination with a good IDE-Support. The main question is about: use a War-Project and be happy with the great Eclipse WTP Connector support and do not waste time to try anything else like EARs or plain ejb-jars. Maybe you could give a better answer with some background information about our requirements and environments.
In our company we are using Eclipse for Java-Development. We are using plain Tomcat for Web-Development (mainly JSF) and for now in some projects already TomEE. Historically we have also server parts which are running from a Java Main Method without any container. A plan might be in the future to get also this servers to the JEE world. As a footnote: we are most time project driven, so for now we have no real products where we can put a lot of efforts in refactoring until everything is as nice as it could.
In the projects where we used TomEE we created two or more War-Applications to separate development and robustness of the different parts of the whole system. For example we defined a portal.war, a notification-service.war and reporting-service.war. Every War-Apllication has its own Business and Persistency-Layer where only the things are modeled which are needed e.g. JPA-EntityBeans. The portal has naturally also a UI-Layer in this case a JSF. If there is some inter-application communication needed the War-Applications talk over some Remote-Interfaces and/or JMS with each other, depending on the use cases.
Currently our big question is if the War-File approach for applications without any UI-layer is the right one. It feels a little bit that this is not the nature of War-Files;-) The other way we could imagine is to create ejb-jars out of the notification- and reporting-service applications.
At this point our big question is the IDE Support. The Eclipse Support for Tomcat/TomEE over the WTP-Connector is excellent, but it covers only War-Projects. So I tried the OpenEJB Eclipse Plugin (https://openejb.apache.org/openejb-eclipse-plugin.html). First of all, it seems to work, but nevertheless it seems also a little bit outdated. Does someone has some real experiences with it, especially with debugging, workspace maven dependency resolution?
We have also some doubts about using EAR-Files, we could not imagine how the development process should work, running only certain parts for development in container for better startup time etc. And our real big problem with it is, that we do not see any IDE-Support. Do you have some other experiences in this field?
And maybe in the end, is this all about ideology and don't waste your time for thinking about misusage of War-Applications!?
Thank you in advance for your answers! Best regards, Alexander Wagner
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