An ugly hack that can still let me get almost what I want with quick development was to make a proxy to transactions and then turn them off for Resin. Ugly, not production quality, but lets me get almost all of what I need. Still not very happy about the sad state of app servers, especially Orion since it offers features that don't seem to work and otherwise would be everything I need. But I guess that's the story of Orion... it's always just "almost perfect".

10:38:04 AM    comment []

OK, after thinking I'd found the holy grail of super quick webapp development (see previous story), I found that Resin's JTA implementation is the pits. Great. So I tried to apply the same technique to Orion. Except that Orion doesn't have any feature in orion-web.xml to let it deploy from my src structure (outlined below). Specifically, it can't be told where WEB-INF/lib is, where-as Resin and Jetty can. Also, Orion (even though the options are there in orion-web.xml) doesn't seem to see my source changes (or class changes even!) and redeploy the webapp. Great.

Jetty and Tomcat are a no-go, because that would mean I have to use Tyrex, which I refuse to do. JBoss+Jetty might work, but is hard to get working inside of IDEA and also still doesn't solve the redeploy issue I'm trying to address.

So here's by directory structure:

• build/java (IDEA compiles classes here)
• src/java (sources)
• src/webapp (complete webapp, minus WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib)
• lib/core (what will become WEB-INF/lib)

I'm sure a lot of you see a familiar structure here (a la maven, but not quite maven). Any thoughts of how I can get a good app server (say, Orion) to quickly redeploy (I'm fine if I having to touch web.xml, I can automate this with an ant task that automatically runs after compile) while also running within IDEA (that's key for me)? Another problem with Orion was that the classpaths that IDEA sets up when running Orion inside of IDEA screw up Orions ClassLoaders, and so touching web.xml has no effect. Sigh, I give up.

Anyone got any tips to share?

10:29:03 AM    comment []