a productive jsp/jboss/tomcat environment

[Khusro Jaleel]

Hello everyone,

I've currently had to take up web based programming and until now I have been doing J2EE stuff using JBoss 4 in Eclipse 3.2 on Mac OSX.

The issues I hope you can answer are:

- I haven't been using any Eclipse plugins to make the whole compile/redeploy cycle for JBoss easier, and I am wondering what solutions work best for you guys? I prefer to design the GUIs in Netbeans though and I import those files into my Eclipse project. Making a simple change and redeploying is a manual process of ant + copy to jboss deploy dir in Terminal. I have tried solutions like JBoss Eclipse before, but is there a better way to do it, especially with regards to web apps in tomcat?

- I also need to find a way to make it quicker to change/redeploy web-based jsp/struts things so that I can quickly see the results of my changes, especially if I edit web pages. Currently the web pages are edited in Dreamweaver by a designer and I import them as well and add tags, etc to them. I need to see the results of my changes to the web pages and Actions classes as fast as possible. I know I need to redeploy, but what is the fastest way of doing that? Perhaps a Eclipse integrated method that runs JBoss+Tomcat within Eclipse or something like that?

- The web designers prefer to use Dreamweaver to do the pages, but how do you manage a "single" page going back-and-forth between designer and programmer? Is there a way to make Dreamweaver understand the JSP specific changes so that the pages always look like they are supposed to? I've seen a JSP plugin for Dreamweaver on the Net but it is Windows specific and we are all on Mac OSX.

Hope I get some interesting answers :-)

Thanks.

[graham king]

Originally posted by Khusro Jaleel:

- quicker to change/redeploy web-based jsp/struts

The jsp's are usually held in a working directory for the container. If you are concentrating on these and need immediate results modify the page there in something like TextPad. You'll see your changes immediately, but, don't forget to apply the changes back to your files or it's of no use.

The struts-config.xml is read at deployment time by their ActionServlet. Not sure how you can do that at runtime.

Originally posted by Khusro Jaleel:

- The web designers prefer to use Dreamweaver to do the pages, but how do you manage a "single" page going back-and-forth between designer and programmer? Is there a way to make Dreamweaver understand the JSP specific changes so that the pages always look like they are supposed to? I've seen a JSP plugin for Dreamweaver on the Net but it is Windows specific and we are all on Mac OSX.

Make the designer and programmer one person ;) Maybe usa CVS? or a wiki??

Eclipse has a plugin called Lomboz which is good with the JSP language and custom TLD's.

hth