Guys, I'm sorry if I sounded overly-critical yesterday. I realize that I've only been working on AS7 a few weeks while some of you have been putting in long hours on it for months and months. There's a lot of really great stuff in AS7 but I don't think we want the user's first impression to be a turn-off. I've seen this sort of thing kill great software in the past and we really, really need to get it right.
So I ask you to take advantage of my perspective here, which is as one who is coming to the product with little knowlege of how or why certain decisions were made. I just want to deploy something.
So this morning I downloaded the beta and tried to do just that. I tried to deploy something. I see the README file that talks about "dodeploy" files. So my earlier criticism about how I would know about it is somewhat alleviated.
But here is how it turned out:
1) Download AS
2) Drop my WAR in standalone/deployments
3) Start AS
Nothing happens. Decide it's time to look at the README. (BTW, the README says "/deployment" but the dir name is plural "/deployments")
1) Create a "dodeploy" file.
2) Start AS
Nothing happens. I notice that my dodeploy file name is misspelled. The WAR name is a little long and complicated, so that's not surprising. But I'm annoyed at the fact that I had to type it and now I have to fix it.
1) Fix the file name
2) Start AS
Nothing happens except that I get this warning:
09:08:26,174 WARN [org.jboss.as.deployment] (pool-6-thread-1) Deployment of 'C:
\jboss-7.0.0.Beta1\standalone\deployments\mojarra2.0-notbundled.war.dodeploy' re
quested, but the deployment is not present
But I know the deployment is there! Maybe I should touch the dodeploy. I can't do that from Explorer so I have to open a command prompt. There is no "touch" command on Windows, but luckily I have Cygwin in my path for just such occasions. Woops! I can't touch what isn't there. My dodeploy file is gone!! Where did it go?
Let's take the README a more literally. Instead of creating a dodeploy file and starting the server, let's try starting the server and actually issuing the touch command from the command prompt.
1) Start AS
2) cd to standalone/deployments
3) touch my-long-funky-war-name.war.dodeploy
It finally deploys!!
Pretending that I'm a developer seeing AS7 for the first time, what's my impression? Love the quick boot time. Hate the deployment mechanism. Fix the latter and I'm very, very happy.
Stan