[jbosside-dev] Multiple modules per project in Webtools

[Marshall Culpepper]

Hey guys..

Last week Rob and I attended the JEE5 Development Status meeting with 
all the people representing the major sub-projects in WTP. A good 20-30 
minutes was taken up debating our issue (allowing multiple modules 
types/standard facets per project), and I basically wanted to report 
what the conclusion was, as well as some follow up that's been happening 
since then.

It's WTP's stance that Eclipse's project model is not granular enough to 
support multiple modules per project (more or less the runtime 
associations). They have effectively deferred us to the Platform project 
to get this issue resolved so WTP can resolve the issue downstream. 
Their reasoning was they were re-writing the project model from the 
ground up in pre-0.7 days and decided to drop it in favor of Eclipse 
official API. Nevermind the fact that they rewrote the Package Explorer 
(Common Navigator), and Project Natures (Facets). IMO this is a cop-out 
reasoning, but all is not lost. Kosta (I think?) has told us to drum up 
a list of our specific requirements for multiple module types/facets so 
that they will see what they can do to support those configurations 
specifically. During the status call, I had made mention of Seam 
(JSF+EJB3), which seems to be one of the biggest use cases. Can you guys 
give me more specific use cases that we can throw in? The more the 
merrier -- I'm hoping if we swamp them with use cases we can make the 
module model flexible like it always should have been.

Since the call on Thursday, Rob and Kosta (owner of Facets, apparently 
decision maker on our problem) have been going back and forth on a bug 
for support of multiple modules. Given, they've already relegated us to 
the Platform for this problem, but I think it's important that they 
understand how crucial this feature is for our product and our 
extenders. Understandably, Rob is starting to steam and it would be 
really great if all of us could show our support by either commenting or 
voting on this bug:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=172704

Currently it's marked as WONTFIX.. my goal is to drum up some more 
debate at the least.. if we're lucky maybe we can pull in some more 
WTPers into the fold and make pressure to fix this issue either in WTP 
or upstream in Platform.

-- 
Marshall Culpepper
marshall.culpepper at jboss.com
JBossIDE Team Lead
JBoss, a division of Red Hat