Tuesday April 19, 2005
Tuesday April 19, 2005
Develop in NetBeans IDE 4.1, Deploy Anywhere
An unnamed developer, in an as-yet unpublished article, which I was lucky enough to read, really clarified a couple of things for me today. In a recent blog entry, it suddenly dawned on me that even though I had some cool little Ant scripts (hooked up to cool little NetBeans IDE menu items) for starting, debugging, stopping, testing, and deploying to a variety of servers (JBoss 4, Tomcat 4, and JRun 4), I couldn't really develop much in the IDE for these servers, because each has its own server-specific deployment descriptors (such as sun-web.xml, jboss-web.xml, jboss.xml, config.xml). At the end of that blog entry I had a brief Eureka moment, when I blogged the fact that I had just discovered the Migration Tool for the Sun Java System Application Server 8 Download.
However, thanks to this unnamed developer (unnamed because his article hasn't been officially released yet) my Eureka moment is even bigger. I hope I'm not stealing his thunder, but his article mentions the absolutely brilliant XDoclet, which can transform deployment descriptors from one server vendor into the deployment descriptors of another. I guess to many people that's not really news, because XDoclet's been around for a while. But, for me, the following is pretty revolutionary:
<target name="Transform-JBoss-Web" depends="init,init-xdoclet" description="Generate web deployment descriptors">
<webdoclet destdir="${build.dir.jboss}/WEB-INF"
excludedtags="@author"
addedtags="@xdoclet-generated at ${TODAY},@copyright The XDoclet Team,@author XDoclet"
verbose="false">
<fileset dir="${src.root}">
<include name="**/*Servlet.java"/>
</fileset>
<jbosswebxml version="4.0" />
</webdoclet>
</target>
Anyway, that's all I'm going to say, because otherwise the unnamed developer's article is not going to be as cool and educational as I suspect it will be.
Update 04/20/05: Click here to read the cool article referred to above.
Apr 19 2005, 07:48:23 AM PDT Permalink
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