Is there any guide showing how to build effectively an application with appengine and maven in eclipse?

Question

I'm trying to develop an application using Google App-Engine and Maven using Eclipse. I am facing a problem where by whenever you change a CSS or JSP file, a restart of the application is required. This makes working quite difficult, since a reload takes a lot of time.

For example when you develop on tomcat no need for restart is required when such a change is made, only Java or xml file require restart of the server.

Is there a solution that mimics the tomcat behavior on GAE SDK when developing on localhost?

Answer 1

Building application with appengine in eclipse using maven is not very effective and time consuming because on every change on jsp/css/js with a traditional approach there is a need to restart appengine or mvn appengine:devserver.

@adevine make me thought about a solution, and I found this link: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/filesync/index.html wich installs a plugin in eclipse, then I activate the project to sync files from myapp/src/main/webapp to a target folder generated by maven myapp/target/myapp-snapshot-0.0.1.

It's working!!!

Whenever a change is done in webapp the files are transfered automtically(no need to run anything else, just save the file) to the target folder and are reloaded successfully.

Hope this could help people because its frustrating working with appengine(restarts takes a lot).

Answer 2

If you've built using the standard app engine maven archetype, when you run mvn appengine:devserver from you -ear directory, the exploded war working directory is located here:

<yourapp>/<yourapp>-ear/target/<yourapp>-ear-1.0-SNAPSHOT/<yourapp>-war-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war

If you change any JSPs in this directory, they will get reloaded without needing to restart the devserver.

Thus, you can set up a simple script or command that copies all your JSPs and static files from /-war/src/main/webapp to that deploy directory whenever you want your files to be refreshed. I saw on some threads where people set up their IDE (in this case IntelliJ) to automatically do that copy whenever the IDE loses focuses, which makes it trivial to get pages reloaded.