Glassfish 2.1 unrelyable deployment

Question

Hi there,

i have a glassfish 2.1 server plugged into my eclipses(helious) and it seams that its very unrelable when i deploy my project.

I have a very simple EAR wich i wish to deploy and view the web servies of initialy it sucseeded. Since then has been very temprimental sometimes it will deploy and other it will say its depoyed but not show on the admin console

i have gone through the process of restarting, cleaning, republish and adding and removing the project but nothing seams to work.

as of recently i have been doing this process for near on an hour to try and make it work with no sucsess. I need to get a reliable method going as i am planing some expermentation which will require me to keep uploading the project

Is there somthing i can do to improve its effency or is there a more reliable way to depoy the applications?

Thanks Jon

Answer 1

I have no experience with Glassfish but have seen similar problems with WebLogic and Tomcat.

Eclipse has plugins for integrating with these app servers. They usually do a remarkable job but they're not perfect. In the case of Tomcat, Eclipse quickly copies all compiled .class files directly into Tomcat's exploded application directory, and Tomcat, running in development mode, finds the changed code and reloads the application. When this works, it means your new code is ready to rock moments after you hit Ctrl-S to save a changed source file. But sometimes the app server isn't synchronizing well.

An alternative that has served me well is to do without the tight server integration: Operate the app server standalone (i.e. outside Eclipse), use ant to build a .ear file and the ant deploy task to stop your application, push your updated .war to it and restart the app. The deployment cycle takes a bit longer than what the Eclipse plugin does for you, and you'll have a bit more effort to set up remote debugging. But I find this is the best way to get repeatably effective, reliable deployment.