Re: openejb- ease of use, snapshot and maven

[David Blevins]

Dario,

Thanks for posting!  Been wondering when we would see something from  
you :)

You give some really great feedback and I think you're right that the  
number of people who might get through build part are very slim.  Our  
build isn't very complicated as maven builds go, but all the standard  
issues are there.  We definitely need some snapshots up and I would  
add we need to start shipping some releases.

This isn't as precise as i'd like to see, but there are some  
snapshots available from our continuous integration system  
(continuum) here:

  http://vmbuild.apache.org:8080/continuum/servlet/browse?file=177/ 
target/openejb-3.0.0-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip

But it would be really nice to get something like this going again,  
but for 3.0:

  http://cwiki.apache.org/OPENEJB/latest-unstable.html

On the note if the suggestions for the website updates, definitely  
feel free to make those changes.  Our site is run from the wiki and  
you'll be able to edit just by opening an account and logging in.   
Every bit helps and it'd be very great for others in the same shoes.

On the DNS and hostname issue, do you have any stack traces or some  
detailed info we could put in JIRA?

-David


On Jun 14, 2007, at 6:31 PM, Dario Laverde wrote:

Hello all,

A first (belated) post to the list here - congrats for the  
incubator graduation.

And a thanks to David Blevins for some hands on help at JavaOne.  
I've been
championing OpenEJB since pre 1.0, and have gotten back to it with  
OpenEJB 3 and
look forward to spreading the word on using OpenEJB 3 as the  
reference for learning
EJB 3. However...

I have to second some of the issues posted here, a SNAPSHOT release  
is badly needed
(should have been a requirement for graduating IMO).

Numerous maven issues abound (corrupt repository when building both  
offline and
online, issues with 2.0.6 vs 2.0.5...).  Then there's itest  
failures when dns
doesn't resolve correctly for the local machine (my machine used a  
numeric name that
caused lookup failures for cmp tests).  I've wasted a lot of time  
with these and
other issues - especially manually setting Eclipse projects to  
build OpenEJB 3 in
Eclipse as maven doesn't properly create them (doesn't expand the  
library variable).
And then there's the Java 6 compile errors...

I'd suggest changing the following instructions on the website from:

    $ cd openejb3
    $ mvn clean install -Dassemble

or alternatively when on Unix-like systems

    $cd openejb3
    $ mvn -o -Dmaven.{test,itest}.skip -Dassemble clean install

to simply:

    mvn -Dmaven.{test,itest}.skip -Dassemble clean install

as it's unclear why you would want to build in offline mode  
initially or to skip
tests only on unix-like platforms.

And you should probably add somewhere on that page that if you're  
having problems,
to clear the .m2 repository folder.

I waited until after the graduation to see if perhaps some issues  
would clear up but
I'm currently still having build issues:

java/org/apache/openejb/config/AnnotationDeployer.java:[108,17]
package javax.jws does not exist

I'm working on a how-to tutorial for Eclipse+OpenEJB and would like  
to get past all
these build issues and move on to helping out on the examples  
initiative.

thanks,
Dario Laverde
JUG leader - NYCJava.net


SNAPSHOT RELEASE
I really want to be able to have a downloadable snapshot release. We
want to make it easy for people to download and extract a zipped file
and get started with openejb quickly. Downloading maven first, then
checking out the whole thing and building it and then extracting the
snapshot for usage is really not a very comfortable thought if
somebody had to try to use openejb. It would easily take more than  
1.5
hours of somebody's time, before they can even start using  
openejb. On
top of that they will have to find the zip file from
openejb3\assembly\openejb-standalone\target directory. I dont think
this is very intuitive , even though it is well documented by  
Jacek on
the wiki.
Maybe we already have a link to the snapshot release, but I dont know
where to find it

SETUP DOCS

I want to be able to add some documentation, so that if anybody  
wanted
to use openejb with eclipse, then they should be able to setup their
environment in a few minutes, provided they have downloaded eclipse
and openejb.  I would also like to provide some step by step kind of
docs to write a few ejb's in eclipse, deploy and test them in  
openejb.

THE PROBLEM

My biggest hurdle at this point is Maven. I do not fully  
understand it
and cannot spend enough time on it  to be able to fix the problem
mentioned below:

If i run mvn -Dassemble clean install from root, filtering doesnt
work. however, if i simply run mvn from the openejb-standalone  
module,
filtering works fine. I did try to spend some time on it, but could
not spend too much time. One thing which i have learnt is that we  
need
to specify explicit versions of any plugins we are using in maven. In
future, maven is going to make it mandatory to specify explicit
versions, so it is going to be a good idea to adopt that strategy
right away.

May I also suggest that we do not use beta versions of plugins if  
they
have not been properly tested. Lets stick to the stable releases even
if we lose some cool functionality provided by the beta. We atleast
know that it works and will continue to work (unless some bug was
overlooked, but chances of that happening are lesser for stable than
beta versions)

MAVEN  and OPENEJB GURUS -- If you can point me in the right  
direction
to fix the above issue, that would be awesome!!. Once the above
problem is fixed, then if somebody can provide any guidance on how to
automatically link the snapshot release on the openejb website, that
would be a big help.
--
Karan Malhi