Steven
Thanks for your reply and previous post, http://objectstyle.org/
woproject-old/lists/woproject-dev/2005/02/0038.html. I had consulted
it and the other post that led to WOL-221. I did get my WOLips based
Hello World app to deploy on Tomcat, but it was a lot of work. BTW.
I like'd your video and approach in your app. Very nice. Go Hokies!
At the risk of over stepping my bounds, the question that I like to
ask in general is "what should be the level of support in WOLips with
respects to WAR deployment?"
I think WOLips, out of the box, should be able to build and deploy a
simple "hello world" WOApplication, with and without EOF. It should
just work. It does not now! Ideally WOLips can do a simple
WonderApplication, and D2WApplication as well.
If at a certain point in the evolution of a given project, we
developers have to customize the web.xml file to get things to work
in our own deployment environments, then that is totally cool. But
right now, it seems the war deployment piece of WOLips requires a lot
of experimentation and manual changes to get it to work.
I'm totally willing to help with as much as I can.
Paul
On Oct 4, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Stephen Edwards wrote:
> Paul Yu wrote:
>> I'm trying to learn how to do a WAR/SSDD deployment to Tomcat.
>
> It's tricky :-). I went through this over a year ago, and posted
> my experiences on the list:
>
> http://objectstyle.org/woproject-old/lists/woproject-dev/
> 2005/02/0038.html
>
> That message may give you some context. I haven't had time
> to write up in any detail how I eventually solved things, but I've
> been building our SSDD war deployment with wolips for over
> a year. I'm no expert, but I can try to help answer questions.
>
> Also, wolips has changed a lot during the intervening time,
> so the web.xml content it generates now may not have some
> of the problems indicated in that older message. YMMV.
>
>> As you can see, no class, no lib, and no Library directories in
>> the WOLips generated directory structure.
>
> Correct. The wolips-generated dir layout is different than
> what xcode will produce, IIRC, and also differs quite a bit from
> what a typical WAR file would look like. It still works, but it does
> mean that the classpath and some other items in the web.xml file
> will look quite a bit different from a non-wolips WAR (or one
> created in xcode).
>
> I'm extremely happy with our SSDD builds and deployment,
> once I figured out how to make it work. Currently, I still use the
> directory layout produced by embed="true" for frameworks within the
> woapplication task for wolips. However, I've switched to a custom
> web.xml file instead of the one generated by wolips for other reasons.
>
> First, I want to be able to distribute our SSDD without a license
> key embedded in it, so other sites (who've purchased their own
> WO licenses) can install and run their own copies of our apps.
> So I had to fix things up so that the app could detect the fact
> that no license was installed, and direct the user to a license entry
> page (and install the license key, etc). Needless to say, that has to
> be done in pure java, without any WO. If you're
> interested, you can see a movie here:
>
> http://web-cat.cs.vt.edu/WCWiki/InstallationWalkthrough
>
> That movie also covers our self-installation wizard, where
> users provide their database server connection info (yes, the
> app handles creation and table setup for all of its internal
> data models, together with auto-upgrading of table structures
> when new versions of our frameworks are released).
>
> Second, I wanted to be able to support automatic updates for
> my app, which runs on a number of servers maintained by
> other organizations. The frameworks in our app are hooked
> together sort of like plug-ins, and each one is separately version-
> controlled. Our app can auto-update its frameworks from an
> update site on the web (sort of like eclipse's update support), and
> also allows new features to be added by downloading and installing
> new frameworks.
>
> To support all this, I ended up having to go with a custom
> subclass of WOServletAdaptor, and some pure java bootstrapping
> code for downloading and installing frameworks (packaged up
> as single jar files). I threw in some code inspired by project
> wonder to build the classpath dynamically (which is how I can
> support adding new features that aren't part of the base install).
>
> By the time you get that far, none of the auto-generated content
> in the web.xml file produced by the woapplication task is
> worth very much :-).
>
> Yes, this was an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y long journey, but the
> results are definitely worth it! And ideas from various contributors
> on this list have certainly helped immensely.
>
> -- Steve
>
> --
> Stephen Edwards 604 McBryde Hall Dept. of
> Computer Science
> e-mail : edward..s.vt.edu U.S. mail: Virginia Tech
> (VPI&SU)
> office phone: (540)-231-5723 Blacksburg,
> VA 24061
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
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