Why the extra deployment step only on some app servers?

[John Fairbairn]

Hi,
I'm moving some jars I created in JBoss to Websphere 5.0.
On some app servers like JBoss you only need to add the app server specific descriptor file ("jboss.xml"). On others, like Websphere or WebLogic you have to do an extra deployment step (ejbjar or ejbdeploy) to add some extra stub classes before you can deploy the ear or jar.
I really find this extra step to be slow and cumbersome (especially with Websphere's Application Assembly Tool (AAT)). Even running the ejbdeploy command from the command line is slow. Any suggestions to speed up this jar creation process are welcome.
Just curious why the extra step and why this has to be so frustratingly slow.
John

[Maximilian Trenks]

well i am not an ibm fanatic but the deployment process with AAT is really cool, when you have some experience. however, i didnt find any mechanism to deploy beans automatically. i guess ibm provides this with some tool (of course you have to buy it ...) like Websphere Studio Application Development.
weblogic does have tools to generate deployment descriptors, create stubs and deploy the bean, so you can use it with batchfiles and ant. however, i like to deploy the beans with the web console. so i generate dd with DDInit and add descriptors, before making the jar file and deploy it on the web interface.

[John Fairbairn]

Thanks max...
how much RAM do you have on your PC when you're running the AAT tool... I find it freezes up occasionally... I have 256...
John

[Chris Mathews]

You do not have to run ejbc to deploy an ejb on WebLogic. WebLogic will automatically run ejbc if it needs to. However, it is in your best interest to run it before hand to catch any errors before deployment time. Ant supports ejbc (thru the ejbjar task) so it is easy to work into your build scripts.
[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: Chris Mathews ]

[Dave Coombes]

J,
On our project we also moved from JBoss to Websphere and found the increased compile/deploy time frustrating. One short cut though (you may already know this) is that the ejbdeploy step is only strictly necessary if the remote interfaces to your EJBs have changed. If you just changed the impementation classes you can just update the jar with the new versions. We find this cuts down the compile/deploy cycle considerably.
Hope this helps
Dave

[Maximilian Trenks]

my pc has 512 MB ram and i have no problems with oracle running on the same machine at the same time.
does anybody know if i can use command line tools to automatically deploy applications with websphere ? i know visual age and other IDEs have plug-ins for websphere ...