[jboss-dev-forums] [JBoss AS7 Development] - Re: Thoughts on filesystem action driven hot deployment

[Dimitris Andreadis]

Dimitris Andreadis [http://community.jboss.org/people/dimitris] created the discussion

"Re: Thoughts on filesystem action driven hot deployment"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.jboss.org/message/593704#593704

--------------------------------------------------------------
I need to apologize for jumping in and out of this thread a couple of times and I understand the frustration from the people actually implementing the stuff. It's has been a very long discussion (and I actually went through the entire thread yesterday to re-establish context) but you need to understand we don't critisize just for the fun of it, but because we feel it is important for our users and customers to get this right.

The old mechanism had its problems but it cannot be outrightly dismissed saying it was broken. It's been in use for a decade and it was one of the key features of JBoss (drag&drop an archive to hotdeploy it, remove to undeploy), a feature that everybody loved and all our competitors copied. Hundrends of thousands of users are already familiar with it. Remember also farming, a mechanism that had even more problems than hotdeployment? We removed it at one point and then we had to add it back because customers liked it no matter how many problems it had.

Going back to the issue, I think we need to have in mind 2 categories of users.

A) The developer, the occasional user or someone who's just playing with JBoss and/or was familiar with the old JBoss. For them, drag&drop should work out of the box. Those guys shouldn't have to *create* a file marker. Maybe they could touch the .deployed marker to cause a redeployment (for both packed/unpacked deployments), or remove it to trigger an undeployment, but in no case they must have to create a marker file themselves. Older IDEs just copying files around should work too (with the exception of those that touch nested descriptors to cause a redeploy). (Oh, yes, and don't forget that 75% of our users use Windoze  :) )

B) The serious developer or admin/script writer. Those guys need safety and either through the IDE that understands about marker files or through scripting, they want the safest deployment method possible. They'll use every marker file trick available.

Those requirements lead to a mixed solution. One that let's you use the usual drag&drop behaviour to deploy/undeploy stuff BUT also let's you use the marker files to enhance the experience. In the case of an unpacked deployment, using the marker file for redeployment/undeployment looks like the best alternative, anyway. I tried to put the workflows in paper and it looks complex to implement, but I prefer the complexity to fall in our hands than to our users who will download AS7 and fail trying to do a simple deployment.

Sorry for the long post, I hope that clarfied a bit my position on this thread.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by going to Community
[http://community.jboss.org/message/593704#593704]

Start a new discussion in JBoss AS7 Development at Community
[http://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2225]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/jboss-dev-forums/attachments/20110317/be4d1404/attachment.html