Hi *,
I was wondering what would be the most practical approach to JSF 2.0 web development using IntelliJ 9, targetting JBoss 6.
My project has a Maven Structure, though I would like to shortcut the build/deployment cycle as much as possible.
How can I exploit the flexibility of an exploded WAR?
Can somebody point me into the right direction?
Thank you very much! J.
Sure, it is quite possible, but you have to use the paid version ("Ultimate" as they brand it).
IDEA understand the JBoss deployment structure and with some effort can have your changes seamlessly deployed to JBoss.
However, in practice I don't find it worth it. If you have a separate build process (as you basically must, unless you use TeamCity) it is much better to just have the build process also have an option to deploy the war or ear to your local JBoss. Otherwise you end up maintaining both, and then finding you change something to work in IDEA and then your build process is broken, and if others are on the project and can make changes to the build process, the same issue applies the other way around.
So the IDEA tools are ok for those who don't understand a build process, really want to deploy just for a prototype and make it real later, or will just use IDEA's generated ANT file for distributing the build afterwards.
For real projects (whether open source where you expect other to download and build your project or proprietary where you have other developers involved), you can really beat have a real build process that you understand and control.