[henk]

I’m using Eclipse 3.0, myeclipse 3.8.1, orion 2.0.2 and JDK 1.4.

I noticed a few ‘bugs’ in the orion deployment.

1] When I deploy a web module, for the first time, the directory application-autodeploy doesn’t exist yet. If I select packaged, an exclamation mark appears next to the deployment but nothing happens. I appeared that if I manually create said directory, the deployment does happen. When I choose for an exploded deployment however, the directory -is- created by myeclipse.

2] auto-deploying a web-module to orion 2.0.2 (the latest version), seems to make little sense. It’s not supported, neither in packaged nor exploded form. A quote from the orionserver support forum:
Currenly, Orion only auto-deploys whole applications (.ear files). A future release may contain auto-deployment of stand-alone modules.

Something that does work (when using context root /) is changing in config/application.xml

<web-module id=”defaultWebApp” path=”../default-web-app” />

into

<web-module id=”defaultWebApp” path=”../application-autodeploy/defaultWebApp ” />

There are some other options, but the main point is that auto deploying a web module never works with orion.

3] When deploying an Enterprise Application, it is again deployed to application-autodeploy. Orion however only supports auto deployment of packaged .ear archives. Maybe there should appear a message when deploying exploded that a user has to make manual changes first in the orion config files before anything works.

Hope that this information may be of use to you.

[Riyad Kalla]

henk this information is very useful to us, I will pass it along and see if we can figure out whats going on here. Thank you for taking the time to send it in.

[Scott Anderson]

henk,

1] When I deploy a web module, for the first time, the directory application-autodeploy doesn’t exist yet.

That’s because you need to configure the orion server for autodeployment first. Orion’s server.xml file must be modified for auto-deployment first and you should create the directory you specified. For example, the server.xml should begin like that shown below.

<application-server application-directory="../applications"
 application-auto-deploy-directory="../application-autodeploy"
 deployment-directory="../application-deployments"
>

2] auto-deploying a web-module to orion 2.0.2 (the latest version), seems to make little sense. It’s not supported, neither in packaged nor exploded form.

Yes, we know. We allowed it anyway because we first began supporting Orion 2 when in pre-release form. We had high hopes that the orion team would see the advantages of allowing exploded deployment, in particular for war’s. At the time, they had posted no direction statement on what they were doing so we decided to leave it available because we didn’t want them to add it and have a version of MyEclipse that wouldn’t allow it.

3] When deploying an Enterprise Application, it is again deployed to application-autodeploy. Orion however only supports auto deployment of packaged .ear archives. Maybe there should appear a message when deploying exploded that a user has to make manual changes first in the orion config files before anything works.

Actually, that’s a good suggestion and should be covered in the docmentation. Which, as you’ve seen, doesn’t really exist for this yet. However, we’re working on it and will be sure to cover what mods are necessary to get Orion off the ground in them.

So, you believe we should just go ahead and completely disallow any type of war deployment for Orion, correct, since no manual workarounds exist either?

Thanks for the comments.

[henk]

@support-scott wrote:

henk,

1] the directory application-autodeploy doesn’t exist yet.

That’s because you need to configure the orion server for autodeployment first.

I am fully aware of that and of course I know how to activate it 🙂

The point however was that packaged deployment fails when the mentioned directory doesn’t exist while exploded deployment just creates that directory and succeeds. This is no big deal but not very consistent. You would expect that both type of deployments would both either fail or succeed when the application-autodeploy dir doesn’t exist. It could be considered a bug, since there is no mentioning of what went wrong. There’s just the exclamation mark and that’s it.

So, you believe we should just go ahead and completely disallow any type of war deployment for Orion, correct, since no manual workarounds exist either?

Not at all! 😯 Manual workarounds absolutely exist 🙂

.war deployment itself works. The only issue is that myeclipse always deploys to “application-autodeploy”, which suggests to first-time users that their .war is automatically deployed. This just isn’t true and might be confusing.

But nothing in the world is stopping you from manually hooking up your .war or exploded web module to for example the default application. You just have to make a tiny change in the orion config file and everything then works as expected.

Like I mentioned above, when using context root “/”:
Change in config/application.xml

<web-module id="defaultWebApp" path="../default-web-app" />

into

<web-module id="defaultWebApp" path="../application-autodeploy/defaultWebApp" /> 

When using anything other then context root “/” (eg. “myapp”)
Add to config/application.xml

<web-module id="myapp" path="../application-autodeploy/myapp" />

and add to default-web-site.xml

<web-app application="default" name="myapp" root="/myapp" />

My suggestion would be to only deploy a packaged enterprise application (.ear) to application-autodeploy, and for the others (exploded enterprise application, exploded web module and packaged web module (.war) ) choose some other directory, maybe myeclipse-deploy/[project name] and mention to the user that manual changes to the config files are required.

Maybe you could offer the user an option to let myeclipse make the changes to the configuration files, although that may become complicated if the user has already modified them from their defaults.

Even more advanced usagage would be to allow deployment of multiple web modules (from different projects in the same workspace) to the same orion server at context root “/”. This can be done by either changing the defaultWebApp in application.xml just before starting orion or by utilizing the <web-site> tag in server.xml.

Thanks for the comments.

No thanks. Thank you for the great software product that myeclipse is. 🙂

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