Development Environment Java 6, Maven 2.x, Eclipse 3.4.x, JBoss 5 and JBoss Seam

Question

I have to organize a development environment where I can run Maven projects with JBoss Seam, IDE eclipse 3.4.x and deploying to JBoss 5. The projects that will run on this environment are based in Java 6, EJB3 and JSF1.2. The environment has to support hot-deploy.

I used to work in a development environment with Sysdeo Plugin to make Tomcat run all my applications - I've rarely used EJB (only for MDB's). So I would prefer an environment similar to this.

I'd like to know what you guys use for the kind of architecture (what kind of eclipse plugins - if they work fine, things like that)

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The thing I really didn't get right is why my Maven2 project with SEAM as a dependency packaged as EAR doesn't appear in my server (in Eclipse Ganymede - tab servers) for me to make deploy (right click - option Add and Remove Projects...). Do I have to include an specific project nature to make my Maven2 EAR project visible to my JBoss AS included in my Eclipse Ganymede?

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Seam doesn't appear to go well with Maven2. I'm facing some problems to make they work together - some dependencies appear to be missing and I have to put some extra files in some special places like seam.properties and components.xml with some special contents. I feel like forced to use seam-gen and Ant. Too bad!

Answer 1

Hi,

I am currently working on the same environment you asked for, with the only difference I am running the app on a tomcat 6.0.18. I prefer to use tomcat 'cause it's so faster to run, and I don't use EJB for now.

Eclipse plugins :

• maven : m2eclipse.codehaus.org
• jboss tools : www.jboss.org/tools
• web tools platform for hot deploying : www.eclipse.org/webtools/

I took the eclipse JEE version, I don't use seam-gen to create the basic architecture.

I don't have so many problems with this environment, sometimes the hot-deploy doesn't work and I have to manually clean files. The only problem I had was with the separation of my app in two modules : eclipse wasn't doing the job well (not taking the last package of one module while building the other one), and I discover the option "disable workspace resolution", which works fine now.

Works fine. Hope it will for you.

Answer 2

Not sure if this is helpful to you, but but we run the following

• eclipse as IDE
• mercurial for source code management
• merclipse mercurial eclipse plugin http://goldenhammers.com/merclipse/
• maven for builds (and m2eclipse)
• mylyn with bugzilla for issue tracking
• tomcat as application server
• hudson for continuous integration https://hudson.dev.java.net/
• reviewboard for code reviews http://www.review-board.org/
• sonar for code quality metrics http://sonar.codehaus.org/
• proxmox VE for virtualization http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

Most things run on separate virtual machines to keep interference to a minimum. Proxmox VE is a breeze to setup (15 mins and you are running).

Hudson monitors the repository and automatically builds and tests each push. If the war build is successful it is automatically (re)deployed (using a hudson plugin) into Tomcat and restarted.

I cannot recommend these tools enough.

HTH