[news.eclipse.webtools] Re: WTP Project construction question

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Keith,

It's probably better to ask on the WTP newsgroup, which I've added to 
the "to" list of the reply so that they'll see your question.


Keith Page wrote:
> This is going to be sort of...involved, so please bear with me. 
> I have several servlets and JBoss services running on a JBoss 4.2 
> server.  I am using Eclipse 3.3.1.1 with WTP 2.0, so I can properly 
> debug my servlets.  I have one 'java utility' project that contains, 
> among other things, practically of my database access code.  When 
> Eclipse deploys my servlet and service projects to my jboss, it packs 
> a copy of the output of this utility project into each .war and .sar 
> file.  This provokes multiple class loading issues, because JBoss 4.2 
> treats each copy of a particular class as a different class (with its 
> own static methods and fields and such-like), but it's not the end of 
> the world. 
> I have a business requirement, that certain of my server actions take 
> place on a separate thread, apart from any threads that a user might 
> be going through (such as a separate 'email people' thread.  If the 
> Transport.send call throws an exception, the user can go about their 
> merry way).  I can use the 
> org.jboss.util.naming.NonSerializableFactory object to converse with 
> my server's instance of JNDI, and I can pass String commands from 
> user-facing threads to a service thread.  This is great, and has 
> improved efficiency of certain operations tremendously. 
> Here's the issue: when I'm using Eclipse (and I like to debug code in 
> my dev environment), the IDE packs each servlet with its own copy of 
> the utility jar.  If I try to send a utility jar object from one 
> servlet to a different thread running a service, I get a Object1 <> 
> Object1 class cast exception.  I can run the server like I would in 
> production, where there's only one utility jar (in 
> /server/default/lib), but then I can't debug code very well.  I've 
> found that if you relay on the ant javac tag with debug="true" set, 
> then you only get to debug certain things (namely line execution and 
> method inputs).  In addition, if I leave a utility jar in my 
> server/default/lib, then Eclipse uses that to compile code before it 
> uses its own project code (because it doesn't understand by itself 
> that one leads to the other), and I'll get weird errors where a 
> servlet call to utility fails even though the utility code is fine. 
> My question?
>
> How do I set up Eclipse so that
> a) I can get full debug powers in the development environment?
> and
> b) I can avoid having multiple copies of my utility project scattered 
> about my individual servlet environments?
>
> Thank you all for your time and attention.  I much prefer Eclipse to 
> my previous development environment, which was Notepad.  Which might 
> explain why I'm in this current pickle.  I own a copy of the Eclipse 
> WTP book, but it's for Eclipse 2.0/WTP 0.8, so it wasn't much help. 
>
> Regards,
> Keith Page