[undertow-dev] Undertow development mode

[Stuart Douglas]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Max Andersen" <manderse at redhat.com>
> To: "Stuart Douglas" <sdouglas at redhat.com>
> Cc: undertow-dev at lists.jboss.org, "Pete Muir" <pmuir at redhat.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, 31 July, 2013 2:12:12 PM
> Subject: Re: Undertow development mode
> 
> First off Stuart - can I give you a hug ? This is awesome!
> 
> How is this flag set ? it should be do able via a startup flag and not
> require to invoke some management operation after the startup to be really
> useful.
> i.e. --dev command line flag.

Unfortunately at the moment this is enabled via a management op, or adding 

<development-mode/> 

into standalone.xml (this actually allows you to control which development mode features you want). 

What about if I did something like:

<development-mode enabled="${jboss.development.mode:false}" />

And had that in the default config, this would allow you to effectively set this via a -D option on the command line?

> 
> >In Wildfly upstream I am introducing a 'development mode' flag (it is
> >actually in Alpha3 as well, but I am going to change how it is represented
> >in the model).
> >Basically the idea with this is that when this flag is set the server
> >behaves in a way that is much more developer friendly, but is not suitable
> >for production use. So far the changes are:
> >
> >- Set JSP development mode
> 
> Great - so this means Wildfly will recompile .jsp files when changed, correct
> ? Anything else ?

Nope, this is just the existing JSP development mode setting, its just that it will all be controlled by 1 flag now. 

> 
> >- Display stack traces in error pages. We do not do this by default for
> >security reasons.
> 
> Cool.

Do you think it would be useful to display additional information in these pages like session contents, request contents etc, sort of like the old seam 2 debug page?

> 
> >- Disable caching so file changes are picked up straight away
> 
> Okey - haven't really noticed caching happening in the past though (except
> when VFS was put in front of seam ear's in AS5 days).

Without this Undertow will cache static resources by default, so if you modify a html page it will not be picked up. We don't check for changes because checking the file timestamp is actually quite a slow operation.  

> 
> >- Optionally persist session information across redeployments (still needs a
> >little bit of work), which should prevent a developer from having to re-log
> >in every time they redeploy.
> 
> AWESOME x infinity!

At the moment this only works across redeploys, not restarts, although I should have it working for both fairly soon. 

Stuart

> 
> >I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for other features we could add to
> >make development easier?
> 
> JSF/facelets have a development mode too if I recall? maybe that makes sense
> too ?
> 
> /max
> 
> 
>