I use Eclipse for Java development and usually the target application server is SJSAS, Sun’s J2EE appserver. Sun seem to have trouble sorting out their naming of things sometimes. Recall Java version 1.5 or 5 or ??? It doesn’t matter, but I think the story is that since they open sourced it they’re calling it Glassfish. So, while my customer is calling it SJSAS I’m seeing Glassfish. This is fine.

At the moment the version we want is 2.1. There are preliminary versions of V3 available but not something I have time for just now.

What I do need is a better way to start and stop it and deploy the app for testing. They do this with a plugin in Eclipse which supports several app servers like JBoss etc. I tried various instructions I found on the web, people have gone to a lot of trouble on these. But the one that actually worked was here. The others involved downloading during the server setup and they gave me an ArrayOutOfBoundsException.

They basically use the Eclipse update mechanism to pull the plugin from
http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-1423.html
Then you can configure the server by using the server window, right click and pick ‘New’ and follow your nose.

However the update took a long time to install after it had pulled it down. I almost gave up waiting. It was sitting for ages taking about 50% of the CPU and looking a lot like an infinite loop from the outside. But it did finish eventually. I haven’t verified all the functions but it definitely starts the server and stops it. I need to try out the deployment options.

Under JBoss my build just copies the ear to the deploy directory. That reloads automatically but if it doesn’t (I don’t always trust it) I can restart it from the plugin. I’m expecting to replicate that functionality for Glassfish but it won’t be quite the same. I can copy to an autodeploy directory which ought to work but previous experiments seems to fail on this.

I will persevere.