Some feedback about Jonas 5.2 M4 and Eclipse JEE 3.6.2 + JOPE 5.1

Dear all,

I guess many of you are using ant or maven for deploying your apps on jonas.

In my case, I use Eclipse as main environment for experimenting some
parts of the JEE specification on Jonas.

Here are a few things I noticed regarding the integration of Jonas 5.2
with Eclipse 3.6.2.

a) deployment with recent releases of WTP (Eclipse JEE)

WTP has changed last year the way the dependencies are described into
web projects.

The dependencies are now expressed in the "Deployment Assembly" menu
item from the project properties.

I noticed yesterday that utility jars (from an Eclipse "Utility
Project") are not correctly embedded in the ear to be deployed
in Jonas.

Indeed, AFAIK, utility jars are supposed to be located in a lib
directory in the ear archive to be shared among all the components of
the ear.

When creating an ear, the information regarding the lib directory is
correctly displayed in the ear project. However, when the ear file is
built for deployment in Jonas, the utility jar in added in the root of
the archive, not in the lib directory.

As a consequence, the other modules (webapps in my case), are not able
to see the content of that jar. My only solution for now is to unzip the
produced ear, create the lib directory, move the utility jar in it and
create a new zip.

I used the latest version of Eclipse JEE (3.6 SR2) + Jope 5.1 + Jonas
5.2 M4 for my tests.

It means for me that deploying an ear containing JPA entities shared
between webapps cannot be done within Eclipse :(

b) Access to JPA 2.0 api in Eclipse

The runtime of Jonas 5.x is defined as being the content of
$JONAS_HOME/lib/common + internal-ee-tld + java-ee-api.

Jonas 5.2 is supposed to be JPA 2.0 friendly. However, the JPA 2.0 api
is not included in java-ee-api, which makes the use of JPA 2.0 a bit
painful inside eclipse (my workaround is for the moment to move the jpa
2.0 api from the bootstrap directory to lib/common to have it seen from
Eclipse, not very nice :()

I know that we already discussed that issue last year, and that passing
TCK for JEE 5 is at the origin of that organization of the API, but it
would be nice to have an easy way to pick those extra jars in Jope in
some ways.


I use Jonas in academia, just to demonstrate some features of EJB
programming, so a basic integration of Jonas and Eclipse is sufficient
for me.

I think the current Jope WTP adapter is no far away from that right now.
However, Jope does not seem much active currently (no new release since
November 2009?).

I wonder what kind of IDE integration people are using in this list?

(Being a member of both OW2 and Eclipse communities drives me to use
those two tools together, so using another IDE is not an option ;))

Keep up the good work!

	Daniel

-- 
             Daniel Le Berre             mailto:[email protected]
             MCF-HDR,  CRIL-CNRS UMR 8188,  Universite d'Artois
             http://www.cril.univ-artois.fr/~leberre