Re: Improvements on SmartFrog

Gustavo Mendes wrote:
> Hi people!
> 
>        We have developed some SmartFrog components last year such as
> JBoss and MySQL. Related the process of developing in SmartFrog, we
> have some doubts and suggestions:

Hello,

I'm Steve, one of the SmartFrog team. I'm looking at 
Jboss/tomcat/geronimo tomcat deployment too; thinking of a way to make 
it easy to configure and host all of these alongside resin (already 
available), and to make it easy to deploy war and ear files to deployed 
instances.


>        - Are you planning to improve the Eclipse plugin to allow to
> click in the component names and its declaration appear as the Eclipse
> does with Java files? We think that it  is an important feature to the
> developers/administrators to navigate in the hierarchy of their
> components. For example, when the developer click on the attribute
> that is defined as "comp ATTRIB ext" the eclipse plugin has to show
> the attributte that comp is related to.

I think that is one for the enhancement list.

> 
>       - Are you planning to improve the error messages that are showed
> in the process of compilation? We think that the error messages and
> the way that they are showed are not intuitive.

If there are any specific places where you were unhappy with the 
messages, tell us and we will do our best to fix them. Its always 
important for error messages to be intuitive, especially with tools 
users are not familiar with.

> 
>       - Build.xml file: We think that the build.xml that is
> distributed with SmartFrog is extremely dependent on the SmartFrog
> directories hierarchy. For example, if a developer want to develop a
> new component in SmartFrog, the easiest way is creating a subdirectory
> in $SMARTFROG/examples/ to use the build.xml to build his project. We
> think that via the Eclipse plugin or via a new build.xml for
> developers/administrators is a good idea.

which build.xml are you using?

We have been reworking the build file(s), so that you build components 
in a separate tree, called components,
Each component lives in a separate source tree, and can have its own 
unit test suite. We also have a set of Ant tasks to deploy, undeploy and 
control SmartFrog daemons as part of the source process. The build files 
related to this should be a foundation to do stuff outside the main 
source tree -you just need to set a few properties to point to where the 
core directory tree is to aid integration.

Even so, I will have to be the first to point out that the build process 
is complex. One of my colleagues, Kumar, has been busy improving the 
build process for doing product releases, and he has added a lot of 
stuff, such as forrest-based documentation. With all this stuff in place 
you *can* do standalone component development, with integrated 
deployment. One of the components we have is a JUnit component, which 
could act as a foundation for integrating testing with deployment. We 
need to work in this more, but it should start.

Another components in the 'ongoing' state is one to generate/manipulate 
XML documents. This should make it easier to autogenerate XML 
descriptors for deploying stuff, and Julio is planning on bringing the 
JMX support back in sync with the current codebase. Both of these are in 
the components tree, and are self-contained JAR files. If you check out 
core/components/junit or core/components/xml, you will see examples of 
our current build/test process. I would recommend you use the junit 
component as the example of what to do.

I suspect we are going to have to look at maven-based builds before 
long, as we seem to be reaching some of the limits of Ant's scalability. 
With the <import> feature of Ant 1.6 we can share template build files, 
but you end up very sensitive to directory placements (you need the 
shared files in the expected locations), and changes to our common.xml 
file can have adverse consequences everywhere.

Would you be interested in maven support? We already run some of its 
reporting services on an internal server, under cruise control.

-steve


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