Blogging Roller

I'm still totally bogged down in my new job and in finishing up the ProJSP chapters for APress. That's not going to stop me from making time tonight to go see Matrix Reloaded at the IMAX theater.

I'm still at work now, but I'm waiting for my DB2 install to wrap up, so I have some time. I'm testing the limits of my new laptop by installing WebSphere, WebLogic, DB2, and Oracle. I need to learn the nitty-gritty details of J2EE/WebApp/EJB deployment on those platforms.

I also need to get back up to speed on XDoclet and EJB. To get a jump-start on the re-learning curve, I downloaded JBoss-IDE. JBoss-IDE is a plugin for Eclipse that does two jobs. Job #1 is starting JBoss, stopping JBoss, and viewing JBoss log files. Job #2 is providing a new GUI for configuring and running XDoclet. Take a look at the tutorial (PDF) for more information and screenshots.

The JBoss-IDE XDoclet plugin works like this. You use the GUI to configure XDoclet for your project, then the GUI generates an Ant script containing the code to run the XDoclet taks that you configured. You can then call this generated build script from your project's Ant script. This works pretty well and it is really helpful, especially if you are new to XDoclet or if your XDoclet skills have grown rusty. My only complaint is that I cannot figure out how to make JBoss-IDE generate relative jar paths, so I can't share the generated Ant scripts with other developers.