Every once in a while, my employer (IONA) actually allows me to get out of my cube and do a presentation about what I’ve been working on. Last week, I got to give a presentation to a bunch of people about Apache CXF. Specifically, some of the internal architectural things and how they differ from IONA’s older commercial projects.
One of the things that was asked of me was “can you run a sample in a debugger so we can really see what is going on?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? After all, we obviously use debuggers for our own development. Yes, we debug unit/system tests, not the demos, but how different can that be?
Boy was I wrong. Getting the samples up and running in eclipse was NOT fun. Our general builds use maven for building which has a nice “eclipse” plugin that generates eclipse plugins for all the projects/sub-projects. Thus, getting that up and running in eclipse is easy. The samples, however, use an ant based system, not maven. I tried the “New project from ant build.xml” thing from eclipse, but that didn’t work very well. It didn’t wire in the CXF jars properly (it doesn’t traverse the manifest/classpath jars) so the project didn’t work at all. I ended up doing a bunch of hacks to get it working.
I’ve now put on my “todo” list to investigate changing the samples over to something more eclipse friendly. I’d like to move to maven, but that might then require the user to be “online” to build/run the demos. I’m not sure if that’s OK. I’ll need to investigate some more.
Hey Dan, we had a similar issue on OpenEJB for our examples. They all used maven but there are significant number of people using ant. I was eventually able to come up with an ant build script that matches the maven layout so all our examples can now be built and run with ant or maven.
You could switch all your examples over to maven and include them in your build, then grab a copy of this ant build script for the ant people:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openejb/trunk/openejb3/examples/simple-stateless/build.xml