Hi-
This is something that I've struggled with for a while, and never really knew the best practice is.
If you are using
ant to build a web app with the WAR task, how do you structure your directory layout in version control?
the WAR task prefers that there is no existing WEB-INF dir. It will pull in all the assets you specify (DD, web libs) and create the entire nested thing for you.
This works fine in creating a war, but makes for a difficult development environment setup. Since there exists no deployable directory on the filesystem, a new build is required with every single change, even to static html/js/images. This is very frustrating, esp. to the front-end folks who are afraid of build tools like ant ;)
What does everyone else do?
I have been using a workaround - I create a target named "explode" which will manually create a WEB-INF dir, but this seems like a bit of a kludge. It also introduces the possibility of a file mistakenly being added to version control.