build process: making things easier for developers

[James Strachan <ja...@metastuff.com>]

One of the great things about working with JSP is that you can edit a JSP
file and press reload on your web browser and the servlet engine recompiles
and runs your JSP. Very quick compile-edit-delete cycle.

Though lately I've been working on a couple of tag libraries using
jakarta-taglibs style directory hierarchy and there's an unnecessary and
unfortunate step required for JSP developer, calling an Ant build to copy
JSP from the source tree to the build tree. It would be nice if for
developers this step wasn't needed unless something major happens (e.g.
changing a TLD or changing a tag implementation).

In the past I've used the source tree of a web app as the 'build area' - the
build creates the WEB-INF directory and puts everything required in there.

e.g. a typical "source" directory of a sample web app may be:-

/examples/web/
    index.jsp
    foo.jsp

then after an ant build we get

/examples/web/
    index.jsp
    foo.jsp
    WEB-INF/
        lib/
            taglib.jar
        taglib.tld

We can then point our Servlet engine to "/examples/web" and away we go.
Then to clean this developer build we just delete the
"/examples/web/WEB-INF" directory.

The advantage is I can just edit the JSP in the sample web app (e.g.
index.jsp or foo.jsp) in place without the extra Ant build step. So I get
the quick round trip development model back when editing JSP.

Thoughts?

<James/>


James Strachan
=============
email: james@metastuff.com
web: http://www.metastuff.com

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Re: build process: making things easier for developers

[Pierre Delisle <pi...@sun.com>]

James Strachan wrote:

> The advantage is I can just edit the JSP in the sample web app (e.g.
> index.jsp or foo.jsp) in place without the extra Ant build step. So I get
> the quick round trip development model back when editing JSP.
> 
> Thoughts?

Yes. This makes a lot of sense. Since we're currently talking about
re-vamping the build process, it would be a good time to tackle 
this as well.

    -- Pierre