[Engine-devel] Java Development Lifecycle

[Mooli Tayer]

Hello,

I've been working on the engine for a few month now,
And I feel I have not yet been able to find a productive and fast approach  
for Java development in different engine components.

This revolves mainly around:

Compiling and deploying artifacts:
==================================
If I want to check a small change in the engine,
Be it in an artifact that is part of engine.ear or when I am working on one of the side tools
that might run as a service (e.g ovirt-engine-notifier)
or just a single jar (engine-manage-domains)
It is essential to compile only parts of the project and not all of it.

This can be achieved usually quite easily with mvn,
however afterwards I would like to be able to also deploy and run it locally
or even take all jars comprising a project and run them exploded inside my IDE 
(I use intellij idea) so I can enjoy live code editing and other benefits idea
jboss & gwt integration offers. I have been using remote debug 
(which is available by default in the engine and non existent in other jars so
I have to tamper manually with a python service file to add debug flags - see next)
But it's not as powerful as running inside an IDE and I feel my current development lifecycle is 
not as fast and productive as it could have been.
(I do understand the engine is complex regarding configuration and deployment, so it's a challenge)

Configuration:
==============
This might be more of a todo item, I'm not sure..
After deployment of an artifact to run on a machine(again, engine, notifier or whatever)
if I want to change it's configuration 
(configure it for remote debug as mentioned or change it's logging behavior and so on)
It seems I always have to do it in a different place which I always spend hours finding.
It could be great if for all artifacts configuration could be streamlined and monolithic
across different components.

These issues might seem obvious to some of you or unneeded to others, but I've decided to shout out
in engine-devel because my usual way of approaching individuals has not got me very far,
and also because I'm convinced some of you have found ways to be productive I am unaware of -
Please share them! Others may have their own good ideas & approaches(or their own needs).

Thanks,
Mooli.