Eclipse with WAS fast deployment setup

0
votes
  1. Which version of Eclipse should I use for WAS9?
  2. What are the steps to enable development with WAS9 on Eclipse?
  3. What configuration should I have to see changes taking effect as I save the files?
1
eclipsewebspherewebsphere-9

1 Answers

1
votes

1. WebSphere Developer Tools only works on Eclipse versions up to (and including) 2020-06

2. Only the before mentioned plugin has to be installed to enable Eclipse to add WAS9 server and to enable publishing to/debugging it from Eclipse.

The plugin's official page: https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/ibm-websphere-application-server-v9x-developer-tools

I installed by: Help, Install software, Add: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/websphere/wasdev/updates/wdt/2020-03_comp/

If you downloaded the WebSphere development tools from the marketplace, then added a server, it should be enough, setting WebSphere JRE is not needed but WDT works best with the JRE that is shipped with WAS (located in /java)

3. To achieve fast deployment, for test driven development I use the following setup:

WAS server options

  • Publishing: Never Publish
  • Publishing settings...
    • Run server with resources within the workspace
    • Minimize and Auto publish options checked.

Project/Build automatically: checked

This way as I save a java or FE file, it is immediately served by the WAS server.

Official, full details for the WAS publishing settings are here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/wasdtfe?topic=server-publishing-settings-websphere-application-traditional

Misc

If there are bigger modifications that would require a publish then my project usually fails to start and I have to do a stop server, full clean build and then start again. Because of this I chose not to do any automatic publishing as the resources updated in Eclipse are already provided from the server and a publish event would trigger the reinstallation of the application that takes a lot of time and in my case fails without full clean install.

Probably you won't need these additional settings in eclipse.ini to load Eclipse with some exta jars that I do load libEclipse directory {com.ibm.ws.orb.jar, com.ibm.msg.client.provider.jar, com.ibm.msg.client.jms.jar, com.ibm.msg.client.jms.internal.jar}

-Djava.endorsed.dirs=C:\DEV\libEclipse\
-Dcom.ibm.websphere.thinclient=true