Pros and cons of each JEE server for developing within Eclipse?

Question

Eclipse JEE has a lot of server adapters allowing development against many different application servers like JBoss, Glassfish and WebSphere.

Frequently you can benefit from using another server for developing new features than for production, simply because it may be able to deploy changes much faster and when the functionality is in place, you can iron out bugs for the production platform.

Unfortunately finding that server is a time consuming process, where the experiences of others are invaluable.

If you have experience with any server with an Eclipse Server Adapter, please add your findings and your recommendation. I believe that the following is of interest:

• Does saving a file trigger an update in the server, giving save edit+reload browser functionality?
• How fast is a deployment? (Saved a JSP? Java class? Static file?)
• Can the actual server be downloaded by the Server Adapter Wizard allowing for easy installation?
• Are there known bugs and issues with suitable work-arounds?
• Is debugging fully supported? Is profiling?
• Would you recommend this server?

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Note: Eclipse can also work with Tomcat but that is a web container, which cannot deploy EAR files.

Answer 1

Glassfish v3 JEE 6

• Saving a file updates the server.
• Deployment for smaller EAR files are sub-second. For XHTML files (facelets) this is fast enough for save+reload.
• Server must be downloaded manually, and the latest patches downloaded from within the admin console running on port 4848.
• Debugging is fully supported. Do not know about profiling.

Bugs: It appears that JEE Utility Projects are not properly deployed as their classes are not available to the rest of the EAR.

Recommended: Yes.

Answer 2

Its true that locating server adapter sometime takes longer, sometime impossible.
So most of the time I depend on
"-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=8008".