9:02 a.m.
> What I don't understand--and please bear with my naivety
about
> Eclipse plugin development--is why we can't offer some sort of
> "smart" editor that is aware of the properties defined in the
> pom.xml file and can resolve them when it needs a value (such as
> the JTA data source name).
That is what I would like to do where we can - but will only work
for our editors and projects. We don't control all of the IDE -
sorry ;)
Anyway, the editor is just *one* part of this - then there is the
whole set of framework specific models in place, i.e. JSF and JPA
provided by WTP has their own little model which
expects things to be in a specific place and is not in any way
extendable in this area (afaik).
btw. jta datasource name is an example of something we don't
really need to resolve since it only exists at runtime....
what we want to control is that when you want to do Hibernate
queries from the IDE you use a persistence.xml that is configured
to run in J2SE;
but when deploying it should use the datasource name one - and
this is not controllable with a mere property replacement because
of how persistence.xml's are structured.
We'll need to discuss this in real time to make sound progress, likely
JBossWorld. But I'll leave one statement/inquiry here.
So you are saying that Eclipse basically has no native support for
property substitutions of any kind in project files? I just don't see
how the Eclipse developers missed this absolutely critical requirement
for an IDE. For as long as anyone has been developing Java EE web
applications, system administrators have been using all sorts of
voodoo magic property replacement to get any deployable build
artifact. Variations are just a huge fact of life. The IDE has to be
able to deal with that reality and stop living in it's own ideal world
that every value in a file is concrete.
I'm saying *all* IDE's I know does
not have property replacements
support - not even intellij. If they have I missed it and would really
like to get pointed to an example/docs anything.
Please note there are two problems here: property
replacement/understanding in editor/model and editors not being too much
dependent on location of the file.
Putting my problem solving hat back on, the best way I have found to
deal with this situation, from many years of having to get the IDE to
operate in the real world, is to have an environment switcher. It
tears through the project and replaces configuration files intended
for one app server with configuration files for another. Then, you can
edit them...but of course when you are all done tweaking them (with
permanent changes), you have to copy the files back to their source to
check them in. Otherwise, the changes are just temporary for your
immediate development needs.
yes, that is what I've been doing too - or simply
not depend on the IDE :)
anyway, having such a environment switcher is "more or less" what the
maven profile support does (except the destionation is always in the
build result, anyone know if that can be changed/customzied?).
What would be nice is to (for those locations where it is possible) to
do the "inverse operation" by simply comparing the src and destination
and just do an intelligent merge ;)
Am I missing some obvious way to work? Put Maven completely aside for
a moment and just focus on how to deal with different settings for
different environment in any Java EE project. How is the problem
solved? That is where we need to start when we discuss a solution.
The problem is
unfortunately normally solved with what I normally refer
to as Ant voodoo ;)
but yes, this is something better done face-2-face since its solution
very much depend on what kind of 'property replacement' and what type of
file you do it on.
/max