Question

We have the following scenario with our project:

• A core web application packaged as a
  war file (call it Core project).
• The need to “customize” or “extend” the core app
  per customer (call it Customer project). This mostly includes
  new bean definitions (we’re using
  Spring), ie. replacing service
  implementations in the core.war with
  customer-specific implementations.
• We want to develop the Core and Customer projects independently
• When the Customer project is developed, we need to be able to run/debug it in Eclipse (on Tomcat) with the Core project as a dependency
• When the Customer project is built, the resulting war file “includes” the core and customer projects. So this .war is the customer-specific version of the application

I’m looking for suggestions as to the best way to do this in terms of tooling and project configuration.

We’re using Ant currently, but would like to avoid getting buried in more ant. Has anyone done this with Maven?

I’ve seen a lot of posts on how to build a web application that depends on a java application, but nothing on a web application depending on another web app.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In Eclipse there is a “native” WTP way to do this. It mainly using linked folders and a little hack in .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component file. You can read the article about it at http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=759232&seqNum=3 the chapter called “Dividing a Web Module into Multiple Projects”. The problem with this is that the linked folder must be relative to some path variable can be defined in Window/Preferences/General/Workspace/Linked Resources tab. Otherwise the linked folder definition (can be found in .project file in project root) will contain workstation specific path. The path variable practicly should be the workspace root. This solution works great with WTP, deploy and everything else works like it should.

The second solution is to use ant for it. Forget it. You will deeply regret it.

The third solution is to use maven for it. You can forget the comfort of WTP publishing if you dont do some tricks. Use war overlays like others suggested. Be sure to install both m2eclipse, m2eclipse extras. There is an extension plugin released recently, that can help you. Described at this blog. I did not try it, but looks ok. Anyway Maven have nothing to do with linked folders, so I think even the first solution and this maven overlay can live together if necessary.

As for headless builds you can use HeadlessEclipse for the first solution. It is dead (by me) now, but still works :). If you use the maven overlay + eclipse stuff, headless builds are covered by maven.