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Deploy a WO Application

Last modified by Kieran Kelleher on 2007/01/10 11:20

There comes a time in every app's life when you must deploy. This tutorial will show you how to do that.

1. There are a couple ways to do a deployment build. I personally like to build straight off of the ant build file. By default, though, WOLips has build.xml hidden. So the first thing we need to do is turn off the filter. In the upper right-hand corner of the Package Explorer is a little down arrow. Click on that and select "Filters...". Most views in Eclipse have that same arrow - it allows you get to preference settings for the view.

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2. The Filter dialog will appear, at which point you can uncheck "build.xml" in the list and click "OK".

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3. You'll notice that beneath your project "build.xml" is now visible. If you Right-Click/Ctrl-Click build.xml, then select "Run As" => "Ant Build", that will initiate a deployment build. If you select "Ant Build..." it will bring up an ant configuration dialog where you can choose specific build targets, control build properties, choose your build VM, etc.

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4. Building will open a Console view that shows the output from Ant. When the build is complete it will say <terminated> in the upper left of the console. By default, WOLips builds into a folder called "dist" underneath the project.

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5. But if this is your first time building, you might notice you don't see a folder called "dist" even though the build finished. This is because Eclipse doesn't, by default, automatically refresh the project view to sync with the filesystem (ant runs as a separate process, so it was off creating files and folders without notifying eclipse). The simple solution for this is to Right-Click on the project and select "Refresh", which will sync the project view with the file system.

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6. Since that's kind of annoying, you can turn on auto refresh. If you open "Window" => "Preferences..." and go to "Workspace", you can check "Refresh automatically" and click "OK". Now when you make changes to the filesystem, Eclipse will refresh and display those changes. Note that you take a performance hit when auto-refresh is enabled, but I find it's convenient enough to be worth it.

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7. You now have a "dist" folder under your project that contains a ".woa" with all of your project files in it that you can deploy onto your server. If you have the appropriate permissions setup on your machine, WOLips can install the app as well by right-clicking on the project=>WOLips Ant Tools=>Install, which will perform the same build, but output into "/Library/WebObjects/Applications" instead of "dist".