I am trying to figure out what's the best process to implement for build & deployment for coldfusion project.
I am much more familiar with the regular java stack: some back-end framework (Spring, Struts, etc), bunch of JSP files, then use maven to compile and bundle everything to a .war file that I simply deploy (copy) over to a tomcat webapp directory
Are cfm files practically same as jsp? What are the similarities & differences between Java vs Coldfusion build/deploy process?
The resources I found so far make it sound like to just copy & paste the physical files, which doesn't sound quite right.
The thread here Best Practices for Code/Web Application Deployment? - goes on the generic deployment process, which we already have implemented. We have code repository and maven to manage our build & deployment process, can coldfusion work straight out of the box with the same set up as regular Java/war projects?
A thread in Adobe forum does not give much insights either: Deploying ColdFusion 8 project via EAR/WAR file, plus it talks about EAR rather than WAR.
This is an old link from 2007: build tools: maven and coldfusion seem to indicate maven is not straight out of the box solution, also seems like Coldfusion has no need for dependency management that maven is so useful for?
Can someone help point me to the right direction for build & deployment of coldfusion projects with the following stack:
Code repository, doesn't matter much: Git, svn
Maven build
Deploy project as war into Tomcat7 (not built in)
MySQL db connector
and Lastly - how would the solution be different between CF8 vs CF10? Looks to me CF8 may be worse as it doesn't officially support Tomcat, whereas CF10 runs on modified version of Tomcat?
Thanks!
When it comes to deploying CFML out the box then you really just have to copy and paste the file into your web server. In your case if you are using git just pull it from your repository. You don't have to do anything other then that. However, in some cases you may need to clear your CFML Cache if you don't see the changes immediately. This is my personal process:
Make changes on local machine running a CFML Development environment.
Commit and Push changes to git repository.
Pull changes to Production Server
Clear cache if needed.
It really is simple as that as long as your code makes it that simple.
Answer 1:
I have worked on some substantial apps were the process was zip up all the files, send them to a deployment team and they will unzip at the appropriate location.
Answer 2:
I suspect you are looking for something like CAR files. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/Admin/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbf364104-7fd3.html
Related
I'm a newbie to J2ee though not a complete newbie. I'm unable to find a good resource (book or video) that could help me understand what exactly happens when we build, deploy and publish. I have a fair idea though. So my questions are -
Is there a good resource out there that can help me understand these concepts? I've read some books on struts and servlets/jsp but they don't delve into eclipse and how/what it does. The eclipse documentation has been helpful but only slightly.
When we build an application the the java files are converted into the class files and stored in the java build path. What else happens during build? Many people use the term 'library dependencies', what does this mean? Also, when people refer to dependencies do they refer to files like xml and tld?
At what stage (build or run on server) does the container check to see if the dependencies are alright? Say for instance, if the servlet class/name in the web.xml file.
Is it appropriate to say that build is basically compilation while deploying the project and running it is the same as executing it?
Familiarity with the servlet specification would help you (perhaps some older version would be quicker to read like 2.4), but general understanding of what you build and how you do it in Eclipse is what you are after.
The way I see it is that during the build Eclipse creates almost complete version of WAR (or some other archive, if you use EJBs for instance) and by publishing you deploy it to some server (this is practically the same thing although Eclipse might just configure the server to use exploded WAR that it just prepared instead of copying it to some "deploy" dir that you are supposed to do if you work without an IDE).
If you configure your project well, the build can only mean compilation, but if you have more ceremony in it, then some source generation and moving files around might happen too.
To address your second question, library dependencies can be files that reside in WEB-INF/lib for instance. Read the spec to know what should be there and what should not. Eclipse tries to copy there all defined dependencies of your project.
So far i've been using tomcat and glassfish to develop a testing webapp, without maven. And the usual development-till-deploy cycle is simple :
develop in eclipse ide, with a WebContent folder, which is the root webapp folder that has the WEB-INF, web.xml, WEB-INF/lib, n all. The compiled classes location in eclipse is set to WEB-INF/classes.
after coding, i could just click on the reload button in glassfish admin console for that specific webapp. In tomcat, i believe it's reload also in the tomcat manager.
i could access the web application in the browser
Now if i would like to create a new webapp, that'll make use of latest stuffs of jsf, spring, jpa, hibernate, postgresql :
what recommendation of archetype should i use in the creation of the project ?
can i still use my previous steps of development? because i think it's very easy without having to repackage everything into a war file, or copying it into the tomcat's webapp folder everytime i want to test. Saving the files in eclipse, hit on the reload in the admin console / tomcat manager, and i could instantly test the updated webapp.
Or what do you usually do in the webapp development cycle ? Please share your experiences, =)
Thank you !
Development Cycle with Maven and Friends
Use Maven to drive your code-build-test-deploy-release cycle.
Start with Maven Archetype that suits closest to your web-app. This will create the whole folder structure for you and will add Jar depencies.
Use an embeded light-weight server like Jetty, this will be very fast on dev machine without sucking resources and is highly configurable. Plus, you can set it to auto-reload changes.
Most of Maven project are supposed to be test-driven. Of which Maven takes care of using it's surefire plug-in. So, every build will have a test phase.
You can define multiple profile for various environments (test, dev, prod, Win, Unix..). These profile will alter the behaviour of the project to be compatible with the environment.
Use Cargo, again a Maven plugin to deploy your builds on test or production server, which can be Glassfish, Tomcat, Jetty or any oter webserver.
Use Liquibase with or without Maven :) to manage your database changes the same way you manage your code change.
I came from almost similar project as yours in my previous company. Development with Maven makes things so smooth and the change is appreciable.
A little Google search shows that someone has worked on archetypes for JSF and JPA with Spring
Edit#1 -- added more details
Feasibility and Ease of Use
Maven is born out of neccessity to simplify the dev process for large and distributed code.
Maven is very well integrated with Eclipse -- so it's painless.
Jetty keeps monitoring source folders, so your changes gets deployed almost immediately.
You can customize the build to skip tests, to not build dependecies. When you just edit a UI component, Jetty will silently copy it to "target" folder.
If you're worried about copying and redeploying. You must read THIS to see how efficiently things are done, keeping in mind that you don't have to compile-test-deploy everytime you change a JSP or HTML.
That said, I would like to mention that Maven might be a challanging learning. This is an object oriented way of development cycle, to say. Most of us, who are used to build script, can find a bit tedious/verbose initially.
Resources
I would suggest to go through the following resources
Maven Book - Maven basics
Automated Deployment with Maven - going the whole nine yards If you can, literally follow this pattern.
Maven 2 Effective Implementation -- this book really helped us a lot.
for the q2 :
You can still run/debug app with tomcat from within the IDE (eclipse) even if you change the directory structure. (like the maven dir structure instead of eclipse's dynamic web dir structure)
Project properties - >
project facets - >
Dynamic Web Module ->
Click the appearing "further configuration available"
and set your content dir and context root.
You dont have to package everytime you want to run/debug it.
Another option is using Jetty
And I am sure there are more options others will tell as well.
I've got a simple Dynamic Web project set up in Eclipse 3.6 Helios, but am having trouble getting it to make use of the code in another project that I've got.
I've added a reference to my other project to the build path of my web project, and I've got no problems in terms of compiling, only in terms of deploying and testing the result. The built web application doesn't have a jar in the WEB-INF/lib directory, so fair enough it can't find the code. The question is how I set this up. I've looked through the help that I can find and googled a bit but can't find anything obvious that helps out.
How do I set up my web project so that on deploying it it magically has the code from my dependent project inside it?
Thanks.
Note: Ideally I'd like a solution that doesn't involve setting up some kind of build tool. The web project deploys itself without recourse to any build tool (or at least none visible to end user), so was rather hoping that a references project could be integrated into that easily.
What goes in the deployment is determined not by the build path but by the Deployment Assembly entry in Preferences for the dynamic web project.
Use some build tool like ANT or Ivy or Maven that, on build, copies all the dependencies to WEB-INF/lib
Using a build tool is a good practice to automate build, test and deployment. You may also be interested in plug-ins like Maven Reactor.
I am not sure if there's an answer for this already -- couldn't find one for this (hopefully common) setup:
I recently converted one of my ColdFusion projects to deploy via ANT.
I have a local ant script that instructs a remote server to check out the code, and run the application's specific build file, remotely on the server.
I have a few endpoints:
Live - production (on the production server)
Staging - on the production server, different datasource, etc.
dev - on the local box.
What I have run into it seems is a simple and common problem. I now need ANT to create any build, even locally. Fine, created a local endpoint and it configures for my box.
Issue? How do I get it to show up as a project (automatically if possible) in Eclipse/ColdFusion builder. What I envision is instead of checking out a branch via the subversion plugin in CFBuilder/Eclipse, I now use ANT to do that for me.
Since I use ColdFusion Builder (Eclipse + Adobe's plugin), I have all of eclipse's tools and plugins available to solve the problem of : how can I best call ANT from within Eclipse/ColdFusion Builder, to setup the local build as a project that I can develop and work on?
I think when I check the code back in from the local box, I'd have to be sure not to check in any files with local config paths, etc.
I hope this is a detailed and clear enough explanation, if not, please ask.
Thanks in advance!
You won't be able to have it "automatically" show up in CFBuilder, but you can make it pretty easy.
Eclipse requires the ".project" file, which is a simple xml file that by default generally just contains the project name.
Once you check out your project from SVN, Do file -- new -- ColdFusion project and point it to the directory where you've checked out your code. This will create the .project in there. From there, you can commit that file to SVN.
Subsequent developers who check out the project from SVN can then do File -- Import -- Existing Project into workspace, and point it to their checked out location. Since it'll have the .project file in there (from when you committed it), that project will show up when they search for projects in that import wizard.
Now, that's how you'd do it if you already used ANT to check out the code. However, if you wanted a potentially even easier way, then you can just install either the Subversive or Subclipse plugin into CFBuilder, and then do
file -- new -- checkout project from svn
point to your svn url
select the directory you want to check out
choose a location where you want the code to live
click through to completion
What are good ways of dealing with the issues surrounding plugin code that interacts with outside system?
To give a concrete and representative example, suppose I would like to use Subversion and Eclipse to develop plugins for WordPress. The main code body of WordPress is installed on the webserver, and the plugin code needs to be available in a subdirectory of that server.
I could see how you could simply checkout a copy of your code directly under the web directory on a development machine, but how would you also then integrate this with the IDE?
I am making the assumption here that all the code for the plugin is located under a single directory.
Do most people just add the plugin as a project in an IDE and then place the working folder for the project wherever the 'main' software system wants it to be? Or do people use some kind of symlinks to their home directory?
Short answer - I do have my development and production servers check out the appropriate directories directly from SVN.
For your example:
Develop on the IDE as you would normally, then, when you're ready to test, check in to your local repository. Your development webserver can then have that directory checked out and you can easily test.
Once you're ready for production, merge the change into the production branch, and do an svn update on the production webserver.
Where I work some folks like to use the FileSync Plugin for Eclipse for this purpose, though I have seen some oddities with that plugin where files in the target directory occasionally go missing. The whole structure is:
Ant task to create target directory at desired location (via copy commands, mostly)
FileSync Plugin configured to keep files in sync between development location and target location as you code (sync the Eclipse output folder to a location in the Web server's classpath, etc.)
Of course, symlinks may work better on systems that have good support for symlinks :-)
To me, adding a symlink pointing to your development folder seems like a tidy solution to the problem.
If the main project is on a different machine/webserver, you could use something like sshfs to mount your development directory into the right place on the webserver.