Hi, (This is my first mail using MS Entourage, I¹m sorry if it f**ks up the formatting or charset. At least I turned off HTML!)
I¹m sending this mail to the kernel-development list to get a discussion started about best practices when developing using SESAT and related technologies (e.g. Velocity). As for the Sesam team, I believe there¹s a lot of differences in how the developers do tasks like deploying velocity changes etc. It¹d be good both for our new developers and ³long timers² to see how others do the same tasks, as I¹m sure we all can do our daily tasks a lot quicker. I know at least I need a lot of improvement tips in this area. A few examples to begin with. Front end development. There¹s no need to rebuild the war and restart tomcat if only templates (or css, javascript, etc) have been changed. E.g. If only a couple of .vm files have been modified it¹s enough to copy these out to tomcat. This alone will make front end development much easier to deal with since there¹s no waiting for the build process to finish and tomcat to restart. Something similar for class files would also be great, since most IDE¹s build new class files when they¹re edited. A way of automating this through the IDE would be good. Mick, you might know of good ways of achieving this in NetBeans (?). This also calls for finding out what tomcat settings should be set to support this kind of "auto-deployment". Another issue that is very much related is having the application server use the war¹s target directory as source. That would remove the whole copy-new-files-to-new-directories process. This can easily be done when there¹s only one war package, but when there are a lot of war packages I don¹t know if it¹s possible to have tomcat fetch from the (correct) skin¹s target. A possible solution could be symlinks from $TOMCAT_HOME/webapp/<app> to the different target dirs though I¹m not really sure if this is possible due to the structure of the projects. I hope this can end up on a confluence page once things have been properly discussed. http://sesat.no/debugging-velocity-templates.html gives some clues, though, obviously, just about debugging velocity templates ;-) So, anyone want to share how they solve things like template and java changes? Any comments are welcome! -- Magne _______________________________________________ Kernel-development mailing list [email protected] http://sesat.no/mailman/listinfo/kernel-development
