[jboss-as7-dev] Mirgrating a complex J2EE application from AS5 to AS7 in a proper way

[Sergey Korobitsin]

Hello all,
I'm new in this maillist, and I've found no rules or FAQ on the list, 
so if I'm posting in the wrong place please advise me the right one.

I have a complex J2EE/Web application now successfully working in JBoss
AS 5, and I would like to mirgate it to AS 7. The problem is that my
application (not OpenSource) now built from sources using custom Ant
scripts, no Maven, etc., and consists of:

 * Main EAR application with several WARs and EJB-JARs inside (now in
   AS5 living at server/default/deploy dir)
 * Several shared components as JARs (now living in AS5's
   server/default/lib dir)
 * External dependency libraries (e.g. mysql-connector, fontbox-1.6.0
   and many other, now living in AS5's server/default/lib too)
 * Complex external dependencies (e.g. JackRabbit as RAR, JBPM4 as
   multiple SAR/WAR things, in AS5's deploy)

Due to JBoss AS7 moved to a considerably different class loading style
(JBoss Modules based), I need advises how to move all these to new way
properly. I'll be using standalone AS7 in nearest perspective, and
domain-based AS7 in (maybe near) future.

I've investigated an article on moving JBPM5 (only console) to AS7: 

 http://kverlaen.blogspot.com/2011/07/jbpm5-on-as7-lightning.html

but I see some, I think, improper ways of migrating, e.g.:

> Add the following jars from the jBPM runtime to the WEB-INF/lib folder
> of the server war: hibernate-core, hibernate-entitymanager,
> hibernate-commons-annotations, hibernate-annotations, dom4j, javassist

> [ ... skip ... ]

> Add your database driver (in our case h2.jar) to WEB-INF/lib of the
> server war

(I think these must be configured as separate Modules, maybe I'm wrong?)

The most complex question for me is how to handle my application's
dependencies in a manageable way: if I'll use Maven for building my app,
is there a way to generate AS7 module descriptions automagically from
Maven's build dependencies (also adding correct Dependencies: sections
into respective manifests)?

The other reason why I want to make all this in a proper way is a
question on my software's distributing. Now it's packaged to several
(Debian) packages, which includes a pre-configured AS package,
application's external dependencies package, and the application package
itself. So if I change pre-configuration of AS (very seldom),
dependencies (seldom), and the app itself (frequent), I can control the
update traffic and complexness for customers. I would like to save this
flexibility (and increase it, if possible) when moving to AS7.

-- 
Bright regards, Sergey Korobitsin,
Chief Research Officer
Arta Software, http://arta.kz/
xmpp:undertaker at jabber.arta.kz

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