Help me convince my team in the need of separate development and deployment directory structures

[Danail Grigorov <da...@wizcom.bg>]

Hi everybody.
 
Recently I had a heated discussion with some people in my team about our
development directory structure. We are developing a set of loosely
connected modules to be used in one big web application (the project is
large!). I created separate development structure and created the necessary
Ant scripts. But they argued that it is very hard to work on JSP pages and
config files when you need to rebuild all the time. They prefer to just hit
the refresh button of the browser or restart button of the server and
rock&roll.
 
I tried to explain that using the same structure for developing and
deployment is not flexible - it is hard to include other frameworks, to
create easily customizable deployment scripts, to construct config files and
resources from smaller chunks, etc.
I pointed the recommendations from the mailing lists, from Tomcat's
documentation, but without success ... :-(   Finally they won and changed
the development tree.
 
They prefer the easy way, they want to use their IDE's (JBuilder, JRun
Studio) and don't want to use console scripts.
 
Please, help !   Give me some convincing real life examples why should we
use separate structures.
 
 
Best regards,
Danail Grigorov
 
 
 
P.S. One of the commented applications was Ted Husted's WXXI-GAVEL.  They
claim that it uses single development and deployment structure and there is
nothing wrong with that. Can anybody give me some clues ?

Re: Help me convince my team in the need of separate development and deployment directory structures

[Ted Husted <hu...@apache.org>]

> Danail Grigorov wrote:

> P.S. One of the commented applications was Ted Husted's WXXI-GAVEL.
> They claim that it uses single development and deployment structure
> and there is nothing wrong with that. Can anybody give me some clues ?

I have my development structure under the deployment structure, and then
have Ant copy the class files back up to the deployment structure (under
classes).

So, I go "up" to work on the JSPs, and "down" to work on the Java files. 


-- Ted Husted, Husted dot Com, Fairport NY USA.
-- Custom Software ~ Technical Services.
-- Tel 716 737-3463.
-- http://www.husted.com/about/struts/