Hi ...

I'm a long time RAD user, evaluating Blue for my company. It's got enormous promise. However the immediate task ... adding value to an existing RAD JSF application by accelerating the addition of JPA or Hibernate with the MyEclipse Wizards, isn't going well.

I've searched the forums for RAD migration ... the best I can see is that it was planned for GA but perhaps never made it. Can you confirm that?

Found that it's possible to get Blue to recognize a RAD project by tweaking a few project file parameters, and it even runs acceptably, but will not deploy beyond the first deploy. Behaviour is that the deploy hangs and spins forever, without error messages in SystemOut or deploy log. Note that this is on redeploy after modification. Mods to deployed code also don't seem to trigger automatic hot deploys as in RAD.

Having read the forums, I think your preferred method of migration is code copying. To the best of my knowledge that breaks the Subversion traceability chain and loses our history. Serious drawback.

However, because I'm hot for those Hibernate wizards, I've tried the code migration approach, specifically configuring a fresh Blue project for JSF and Spring (our current combo) then copying:

1. Src contents, and
2. Web contents (only)

Thus no mods to .project, etc.

Same behaviour ... this time on initial deploy ... infinite hang.

Having nearly exhausted my time for the investigation I'm prone to hold out for the second release and try again then, but if there's something I've missed, please let me know.

R.

Quote:

I've searched the forums for RAD migration ... the best I can see is that it was planned for GA but perhaps never made it. Can you confirm that?

Correct, it didn't make it. What we had ready for GA was too simple and figured most folks would balk at it instead of finding it immediately helpful, so we held it back to prepare it a bit more for 6.5.

Quote:

Found that it's possible to get Blue to recognize a RAD project by tweaking a few project file parameters, and it even runs acceptably,

Do you have a reference for this? I'm not aware of how to tweak a RAD project to make Blue like it. I Iknow you can go through a series of "Add Capabilities" wizards to get MyEclipse to understand the project appropriately for Web Projects, but some of your custom edits may have conflicting with what is there.

Quote:

Having read the forums, I think your preferred method of migration is code copying. To the best of my knowledge that breaks the Subversion traceability chain and loses our history. Serious drawback.

You can try a few ways to get around this... "Check out As..." is one way to pull the project down and jam it into another project format from the get-go. But if you have all your project metadata (dot files) checked in with the projects, those might cause problems coming down and redefining the project.

Quote:

Same behaviour ... this time on initial deploy ... infinite hang.

Can you give me some more detail about your runtime configuration? What is the full version of WebSphere, Java, feature packs installed in the current profile, etc?

Yes, of course.

Application server is 6.1.0.15, profiles augmented with Web 2.0, Web Services and EJB3
Java is the version of Java 5 that comes with the 6.1.0.15 upgrade pack
Platform is Windows ... which is a drawback by the way. Ever going to do Linux?

By "do you have a reference" do you mean "how did I do it?" or "who said it was supported?". Nobody said it was supported, be glad to post a how to if you want one.

R.

Quote:

Application server is 6.1.0.15, profiles augmented with Web 2.0, Web Services and EJB3 Java is the version of Java 5 that comes with the 6.1.0.15 upgrade pack Platform is Windows ... which is a drawback by the way.

hmmm... this is exactly what I'm testing with. Can you deploy new projects without the infinite hang? Is it something about that one particular project that causes the infinite hang? Also when a project is deployed Exploded, MyEclipse will sync the changes instantly, so you shouldn't need to reopen the dialog each time and hit redeploy, but even if you did that, it should still work.

Quote:

Ever going to do Linux?

We will respond to the user demand for it, if it's there.

Quote:

By "do you have a reference" do you mean "how did I do it?" or "who said it was supported?". Nobody said it was supported, be glad to post a how to if you want one.

Oh yea, I meant "how did you do it exactly"? I wanted to get some more insight into what you did exactly.

support-rkalla wrote:

Quote: hmmm... this is exactly what I'm testing with. Can you deploy new projects without the infinite hang? Is it something about that one particular project that causes the infinite hang? Also when a project is deployed Exploded, MyEclipse will sync the changes instantly, so you shouldn't need to reopen the dialog each time and hit redeploy, but even if you did that, it should still work. I do believe it is something about the project, in that a new clean project deploys without problem. However after deploying our target project the interaction between Blue and WAS becomes corrupted in some way, in that the new project will no longer deploy. Likewise, while I understand the expected behaviour of a change while deployed, we lose that capability once we've failed to deploy. Quote: Ever going to do Linux? We will respond to the user demand for it, if it's there. Consider it demanded, at least from here. Faster, more reliable, safer. We do all our development using the Linux-based tooling Quote: By "do you have a reference" do you mean "how did I do it?" or "who said it was supported?". Nobody said it was supported, be glad to post a how to if you want one. Oh yea, I meant "how did you do it exactly"? I wanted to get some more insight into what you did exactly.

Did this:

1. Added WAS Build library with alternate workspace JRE per http://www.myeclipseide.com//PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-20093.html

2. Resolved JAXB references by adding WebSphere 6.1 Web Service Client Libraries

3. Removed any extraneous IBM imports in the code

4. Add genuitec NATURES to the .project file to recognize as a web project:
<nature>com.genuitec.eclipse.j2eedt.core.webnature</nature>
<nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>

5. Add an adjusted .mymetadata file

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In order to work around the multitude of variables with migration, I'm trying a clean approach with slightly better but still problematic results, which I'll address in my next reply in this thread.

Clean Approach to JSF project Migration
========================
Tried a clean approach to JSF migration that still has some significant issues, maybe bugs, maybe not. The overall observations are:

1. The clean project approach is doable, albeit with loss of SVN data
2. Initially, at least the clean migrated project partially runs (we'll deal with bugs separately).
3. The deployed clean project is initially modifiable, unlike the hand-hacked migrated project. However in at least one case I had to undeploy, and then found I could never deploy the unmodified hand migrated project again ,even with stopped server, etc. Behaviour was the same as with the hacked-migrated project ... deploy never finishes, no error
4. Note that this project uses both the IBM hx extended faces libraries and MyEclipse tomahawk, integrated successfully in AST and RAD. There is a chance that Blue does not deal happily with that mix of JSF tag libraries
5. For reasons that escape me, the IBM Web Services-WS library is no longer available in my workspace, and I can't find or recall how to enable it. Same WS-enabled IBM server. What am I missing? Had to hand-include jaxb in the classpath for build.

The process I used for clean migrate was:

1. Create a clean Blue Web and EAR project using JEE 1.4
2. Accept default naming for WebRoot. Note that in my previous attempts at clean construction I followed the IBM convention of WebContent. That shouldn't matter, but who knows?
3. Added JSF and Spring natures from the MyEclipse menu, specifying the Sun RI, as the IBM extended tags will need SUN 1.1.
4. Added java sources by copy and paste from a resources view. Copy and paste from JEE view does bad things, doesn't maintain package structures
5. Resolved extensive classpath issues. JARS manually added to WEB-INF/lib:
tomahawk 1.1.6 and tomahawk sandbox 1.1.7
jsf-ibm.jar and odc-jsf.jar for the IBM HX jsf libraries
spring-test.jar because the MyEclipse Spring Testing Support Llibraries did not resolve all my classes in our JUnits
struts.jar because we use Tiles on top of JSF. Did not try the MyEclipse struts ... might have worked
JRE from WAS 6.1 server
JUNIT 4
com.ibm.jaxws.thinclient_6.1.0.jar from WAS_ROOT/runtimes because I couldn't find the WebSphere WS library entry I'd seen earlier

6. Copied the web code but not web-inf contents into WebRoot

7. Copied tiles-defs.xml into WEB-INF

At this point the application was complete and compiling, but essentially disabled, since the original web.xml, applicationContext.xml and faces-config.xml were still in place. I ran it to test behaviour. It ran, and was modifiable, at least at the JSP level.

8. Copied the contents, not the files of the 3 config files above to their Blue counterparts, being careful to use the Blue DTD's.

9. Ran the application with success

The application was modifiable mostly. Blue doesn't see a change in a resource bundle, but sees changes in .Java and .jsp OK, which is fine. However in a series of deploy and redeploys I eventually hung and had to rollback the environment. Happily all our work is in VMWare.

The IBM tags are not happy ... will post as a separate bug

Robin,
I sent this off to one of the leads on the Blue project to analyze and then get back to you. We are introducing our new project migration in the 6.5 release of Blue and you posted a significant amount of details here that we should look into and be able to anticipate during that process.