Running Ear Project Out of Eclipse

Question

My team is taking over an existing web product that is made up of 3 Maven projects: one for a WAR, one for a couple of EJBs, and one that contains a few JBoss config files and builds an EAR that contains the WAR and EJB-JAR from the other two projects. We use Eclipse Helios and are currently building the projects individually with maven install and copying the resulting EAR to an instance of JBoss AS 6 for testing. While that process works, I am exploring the possibility of somehow streamlining that process; ideally a setup where small changes are automatically published to JBoss. Can anyone recommend a resource for configuring our projects/Eclipse to publish changes to JBoss automatically?

Answer 1

Get yourself "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers" and install JBoss Tools. The combination of the two will allow you to configure projects and server instances such that it is easy to deploy and test incremental changes.

Note that for this to work, your projects need to be WTP conformant. If you aren't using WTP already, take a look at the structure and metadata of projects created with Dynamic Web Project, EJB and Enterprise Application Project wizards. Either copy your source into new projects or copy the metadata files and fragments (very carefully).