Hints & Tips for Team Programming in Eclipse and WSAD

[Kyle Brown]

Hi folks, Well, in less than two weeks I have to give a talk on "Team Programming Best Practices in WSAD" to my team. I have an existing presentation that I presented last year at DeveloperWorks Live! but I'm looking for more good advice on using WSAD in a team environment -- particularly from those of you who use WSAD together with ClearCase. So, if you have any "Best practices" to share, please let us know here -- I'll post the final presentation here as well.
Thanks.
Kyle
[ January 28, 2003: Message edited by: Kyle Brown ]

[David Hibbs]

That was a very useful presentation. =)
I don't have any advice for ClearCase, but I could help with PVCS... :roll:
<shamelessPlug>
I also have some docs that I put together on using Eclipse with SourceForge CVS projects. They're available in .ZIP format at http://www.coruscant.cc/PCGen/eclipseSetup.ZIP

</shamelessPlug>

[Kyle Brown]

That's a start, thanks! Denise (my co-author) has a few things to add about using the new VSS plugin, so I'll post that here as well as soon as I get it.
Kyle

[Craig Schwabl]

Hey Kyle, nice presentation. I had a question relating to the PDF...specifically the slide on page 16 (the second one labeled "Project Organization best practices"). In this slide you show a single EAR file (ProjectA.ear) containing 2 WAR files (ProjectA.war and ProjectA'.war). Are you implying that the source code for both WAR files is located in the same CVS project, or are you implying that they are contained in separate CVS projects? The reason that I am asking is that our company develops many different web-based Java applications under Websphere/WSAD, but all of the application components rely on a set of core components including login, security, session management, user management, database access, etc. Most of these core componenets include Servlets, JSP, beans, and various miscellaneous web files. I am trying to organize our source control (CVS) so that the core components could be maintained in one project, and the application components could each reside in their own projects. The goal is that the core components could be deployed with any (or all) of the custom application modules to comprise a deployment. The challenge, however, is the fact that when separate projects are synchronized in WSAD and deployed to the test environment, they are deployed under separate contexts. This means that a user could not log into the "core components" project using one context root, and have seamless access to the application modules deployed using separate context roots. There is also a need to share session information between each project. I tried deploying both the core project and the application project under the same context root, however, it appears that this is not supported by Websphere (or even the J2EE spec). Anyway, do you have any suggestions on how I could accomplish this using WSAD 4.03 and CVS? I am trying to avoid using external build tools (i.e. Ant) if I don't have to.
Thanks.

[Kyle Brown]

Originally posted by Craig Schwabl:
The reason that I am asking is that our company develops many different web-based Java applications under Websphere/WSAD, but all of the application components rely on a set of core components including login, security, session management, user management, database access, etc.

What you want (probably) is to include the core components (the ones that are not themselves J2EE components like Servlets, JSP's or EJB's) inside utility JAR files included in the EAR's. WSAD allows you to define a Java project as a "utility Jar" -- this is a feature of WSAD 5.0, but WSAD 4.0 allows you to do this with the "Zip Creation" plugin (see the reference on my home page). For those core components that ARE J2EE components, you probably want to look into the "independent deployment" option described in this article.
Kyle

[Kyle Brown]

Quick tip that I just learned today when talking to one of the developers -- if you wan to know what Eclipse or WSAD is doing to CVS when you do an action (like a commit or a synchronize) then Go to "Window>Show View>Other" and choose "CVS Console" from the CVS folder. The console will show the commands that WSAD/Eclipse is using when it does any work against the repository -- very useful for understanding how the Eclipse CVS support works!
Kyle

[David Hibbs]

Originally posted by Kyle Brown:
Quick tip that I just learned today when talking to one of the developers ... Go to "Window>Show View>Other" and choose "CVS Console" from the CVS folder.

See my above shameless plug for my SourceForge CVS docs -- Sure they're written for SourceForge, but they'll apply for most any CVS install.

[manoj]

CVS :
1) I am using CVS and WSAD 4.0.2. I have created a stream and attached project to that stream.Now I want to detach project from that stream.From the Repository view we do have option to "Remove project from Stream" but it is disabled.can you please let me know how can I detach a project from the stream if I have to do it...
2) whenver I try to create a new stream it also attaches the projects belonging to the other stream.Why does it do this?
Thanks in advance..
Manoj.