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Coexistence between IDE builds and automated

 
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Hi Mike, met you at your seminar at "No Fluff Just Stuff" earlier this month in Chicago.

Here's a question I have pondered many times and before I go off half-cocked and create a half-xssed solution again, I want to run this one by some knowledgeable people.

I am on a small team that is building a project that runs in JBoss. Our development environment of choice is the JBoss IDE inside Eclipse. Our project consists of a main war file, and some EJBs packaged in an EJB jar. Shared by these two is a common jar that is built separately.

Up to now, it has been fairly painless to simply develop and deploy onto local jboss servers owned by each developer. Nice, fast, responsive, includes debugging, a great tool. But now that we move toward production, the need for an automated build becomes apparent as always, and the quick and dirty builds done by Eclipse and the JBossIDE's "Run Packaging" command are not going to cut it much longer.

Now, I could easily throw together an ant script for an autobuild that would do all of what needs to be done, but the problem here is that now you've got two build processes to keep in synch, which is a maintenance problem in and of itself. So I would like the autobuild to somehow sit on top of the packaging-build.xml files that the JBoss IDE makes. But these, unfortunately, rely on hardcoded paths on the user's machine rather than on ant variables that could be set somewhere.

I suppose this is a limitation you run up against when you rely on the convenience of an IDE build. But has anyone ever created a system that can work either in the IDE or the automated context? So that, for example, a classpath change to the IDE build would automatically be propagated to the automated build?
 
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Eclipse stores the classpath information in an XML file named .classpath in the root folder of a project. It shouldn't be too hard to use that information in an Ant build. Didn't try that yet, though.
 
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I believe there is an ant task in the optional ant libraries to cover this..


ant_contrib library to be exact..
 
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Do you mean mean something like:



ALL my projects are Ant-buildable in addition to whatever IDE I may (or may not) be working with at the moment.

For automated builds, take a look at something like AntHill or Cruise Control.
[ November 15, 2004: Message edited by: Tim Holloway ]
 
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Originally posted by Steve Cohen:
Hi Mike, met you at your seminar at "No Fluff Just Stuff" earlier this month in Chicago.

Here's a question I have pondered many times and before I go off half-cocked and create a half-xssed solution again, I want to run this one by some knowledgeable people.

I am on a small team that is building a project that runs in JBoss. Our development environment of choice is the JBoss IDE inside Eclipse. Our project consists of a main war file, and some EJBs packaged in an EJB jar. Shared by these two is a common jar that is built separately.

Up to now, it has been fairly painless to simply develop and deploy onto local jboss servers owned by each developer. Nice, fast, responsive, includes debugging, a great tool. But now that we move toward production, the need for an automated build becomes apparent as always, and the quick and dirty builds done by Eclipse and the JBossIDE's "Run Packaging" command are not going to cut it much longer.

Now, I could easily throw together an ant script for an autobuild that would do all of what needs to be done, but the problem here is that now you've got two build processes to keep in synch, which is a maintenance problem in and of itself. So I would like the autobuild to somehow sit on top of the packaging-build.xml files that the JBoss IDE makes. But these, unfortunately, rely on hardcoded paths on the user's machine rather than on ant variables that could be set somewhere.

I suppose this is a limitation you run up against when you rely on the convenience of an IDE build. But has anyone ever created a system that can work either in the IDE or the automated context? So that, for example, a classpath change to the IDE build would automatically be propagated to the automated build?



I'm newly in Steve's boat! What magic (customization) DOES Eclipse add to Ant build?? I'm not easily finding a whole lot out there about automating Eclipse plugin/feature/product builds, beyond just a simple example of running org.eclipse.core.ant.antRunner headlessly ... no "real world" production examples, no detail on the arguments to the antRunner command line, etc.
 
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