I'v written a selenium framework which needs to be extended to the team. I've checked in the code in SVN. How can I make sure that external jars are added to build path and folder that folder by other team members? Basically I want to manage these dependencies better. Somebody said, Maven can take care of these so I tried to install m2eclipse plugin for eclipse 3.2 without any success. Can Maven solve this problem and is there any better way of managing it?
Do the easy way: commit the jars into SVN. It will save everybody a lot of time.
If you are amenable to using Eclipse, Maven, and m2eclipse, I would suggest using SpringSource Tool Suite. It is an Eclipse based IDE with Maven and m2eclipse pre-bundled. This bundling makes getting those three tools to work together very easy.
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I am trying to set up a project, but feel completely overwhelmed with lack of knowledge. In university we used netbeans which resolved project structure gently for us. As community leans towards eclipse I am trying to migrate there, but feel myself like a penguin not able to fly. I can't understand project structure where and what has to be added, do I have to define ANT or MAVEN manually in eclipse can they be integrated? Where to go ? Apache manuals are so complicated, why is that I can program in Java , but don't know the fundamentals, soo depressed, please anyone guide me. I find pieces on web, but seems can't build full picture in my head.
You have a couple of options. Basically, eclipse uses a workspace, which contains one .metadata directory used by the plugins and all of the project folders. Projects can then be things like java projects, PDE projects, PHP projects, etc.
There is maven integration in eclipse which I would use, http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/ It was part of Indigo, which released June 2011.
Set up your java projects in your workspace, and then use m2e to mavenize them, or use m2e to generate the java projects into your workspace.
maven provides a facility to create a new project with the required structure based on the type of project (jar, war, etc.).
You can do this or achieve it directly from Eclipse as suggested by Paul Webster, by installing the m2e plugin.
This structure can then be easily built using maven, as well as developed in Eclipse.
I just created a Web App project from a repository through Eclipse's SVN support. What I would be doing is have an ANT build going and then finally deploy through Tomcat.
I am using Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers on an Ubuntu system.
There are a number of jar files needed
to support my project - like Struts,
Hibernate, etc. etc.
Do I need to
manually download each of them
and put them in the lib folder?
OR
Does Eclipse have a solution to
automatically UPDATE these from the internet? Any plugins to automatically take care of this?
You should consider using Maven for your project. It's VERY well supported in Eclipse, and handles all dependencies (as well as other things, such as releases).
The problem is there's a bit of a learning curve, but if you intend your project to get to a considerable size, I'd say it's very important.
Maven has support for ant builds and most libraries are in the central Maven repository. You just say your project has a dependency on the external project and it will automatically download the dependencies.
http://maven.apache.org/
Does anybody have experience working with JavaRebel, specifically for a large web application built using Maven? There is a JavaRebel plugin for Maven that seems under-documented, does anybody have comments on how it works, can you really update one class in a Multi-module Enterprise Project and have it "automagically" change on your Server?
Are there any issues with different IDEs and this setup? For example NetBeans will not let you compile one class at a time in a Maven project (from what I can tell).
Disclaimer: I work for ZeroTurnaround.
JRebel (formerly JavaRebel) installation involves the application configuration file "rebel.xml" and modifying the container startup command line.
The Maven plugin is used to generate the "rebel.xml" file, that is used by the JRebel agent running in the container to find the files in the workspace. This allows to use IDE building to compile .java files and skip the Maven build process, as the changes to files will be picked up from the workspace. However as it relies on the IDE to compile the classes, it does depend on the IDE ability to compile efficiently. I know for sure that Eclipse will compile classes one at a time and am fairly sure you can configure NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA to do the same.
In addition to the Maven/rebel.xml configuration you also need to configure the container startup command line. You may also need to install and IDE plugin or do some additional configuration to have the best expirience with JRebel. Following through the steps of Installation manual ensures that.
Hope this helps.
Disclaimer: I've not actually used this plugin myself.
This tutorial implies that JavaRebel works well with Eclipse 3.4. If you are also using m2eclipse it should work ok with Maven projects as well (as long as you ensure that Maven and Eclipse are compiling to the same target folder so the Eclipse incremental compiler can be used to modify the class file).
According to this post, you should configure the javarebel-maven-plugin to generate the rebel.xml (used to mount external folders to the application classpath). There's also a general installation guide you may find useful.
I'd be interested to find out about any automated processes that people have for ensuring that the project classpaths for the ant and eclipse configurations are in synch. In my case, I want the classpath defined in the ant build file to be the master configuration, since its used for our production builds. As part of the build i'd like to add an ant target that will verify that the eclipse classpath is up to date, or at least indicate differences between the two classpaths.
I'm aware of ant4eclipse but its focus is in the opposite direction, ensuring that the eclipse classpath is master and that the ant build reuses the eclipse path. I like the idea behind AntAndEclipse but am wondering are their ant other tools in this space that i'm not aware of.
You solution at a previous company was to have ant invoke Eclipse to do the compiles as described here:
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-PDE-Automation/automation.html
I'm not aware of any ant tools which can do this but I've switched from ant to Maven a few years ago and never looked back. You can use the "Maven integration for Eclipse" to make Eclipse use the Maven classpath.
As of today, I'm not 100% happy with the Eclipse plugin, though. It's a bit slow and due to the different philosophy of Eclipse and Maven, some operations behave strange. For example, Eclipse doesn't differentiate between a "production" and "test" classpath, so you can get compile errors in Maven when everything looks great in Eclipse.
My solution was to use the plugin to keep the classpath in sync and compile from the commandline.
there is an ant task to do xml transformations, we used that task to create the classpath in our build file. It was a little trick to get the XSL right but once it worked it was great
Did you evaluate Apache IVY? Currently I am building a Continuous Integration environment at our place and we use IVY to handle our dependencies. There is a eclipse plugin that takes the dependency configuration of eclipse and uses it as eclipse classpath.
Currently this solution looks quite promising.
My team wrote an Eclipse plug-in to add a new type of library to the Java Build Path->Add Library option in the project settings. This custom library type allowed both Eclipse and ANT to reference the same canonical list of dependencies.
Nowadays, I'd probably look at IVY for doing the same thing if I was locked into using ANT, rather than writing my own.
You need Ant2Eclipse.
There seem to be two rival Eclipse plugins for integrating with Maven:
m2Eclipse
and
q4e.
Has anyone recently evaluated or used these plugins?
Why would I choose one or the other?
Side by side comparison table of three maven plugins.
There is only one point where q4e is actually better: dependency viewer. You could see the dependency tree, manage your dependencies visually and even see them in a graph. But, m2eclipse works in a better way, specially because you can create you own build commands (in the run menu). q4e comes with some predefined commands and I can't find where to define a new one. In other words, m2eclipse is more friendly to the maven way.
I have been using m2Eclipse for quiet some time now and have found it to be very reliable. I wasn't aware of q4e until I saw this question so I can't recommend one over the other.
My 2cents,
I am using eclipse for some months now with m2eclipse integration. It's easy to use and straight forward. Once you associate your project to maven and update the dependencies using m2eclipse, any change to pom.xml are reflected to entire project, even Java version definition causes it to be compiled in right JRE (if you have it installed, and properly configured into eclipse.)
Another advantage I found is the maven plug-ins are easy to use integrated with eclipse (jetty being my best example, again, properly configured you can easily integrate maven, jetty-plug-in and Eclipse Debugger)
Compilation, packaging and all other maven features are equally easy to use with a couple clicks or shortcuts.
About q4e I have been reading a lot of good stuff about it and seems the next versions will do a lot more than m2eclipse, with a better dependency management and even visual graphs (!) but the general opinion is that m2eclipse is still better than q4e but q4e is getting better each new version and maybe will surpass m2eclipse soon.