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Tuesday May 22, 2007

New GlassFish Integration Feature: New Per-Instance Options

Every now and again, an API that we use in the integration plugin gets deprecated. Sometimes these changes generate busy work. At other times, these changes force us to focus on code that "ain't broke", so we haven't fixed it.

The recent changes to the Options dialog have forced us to examine where the options associated with the plugin get displayed. When we did examine them, we found that the option used to disable directory deployment was at the wrong level. It was "global". That was a good choice in the plugin's early development, but now it seemed like the right "place" for this option was on the individual registered domains.

Once we started thinking about per-instance options a couple other candidates jumped out at us. Both of them are related to the timeouts applied to some operations in the IDE related to the server.

The first timeout is the amount of time the IDE (and therefore users) wait to find out that the IDE knows that server start-up has completed. It had been an unbearable 5+ minutes. In many cases this number can be significantly lower.

The second timeout was the amount of time that the IDE would allow a deployment operation to take, before assuming that the operation had failed. This could also be significantly lower.

One danger of lowering these values, was the potential that we dropped them too far and some valid user deployment configuration would stop working.

We decided to make sure that users could control these timeouts and be able to account for differences between server configurations, if they had to. So we created an additional tab, in the Server Manager UI for GlassFish and SJSAS domains.



Follow this link to a search for all of my entries about new GlassFish integration features for NetBeans 6.0. (2007-05-22 21:31:13.0) Permalink