I just spent an afternoon putting too much trust in the WebLogic sever tools for Eclipse. My modest goal was to modify a JSP and see the change without me having to do anything about it. It’s just a simple file copy after all.
From what I could see there are two ways to deploy my Eclipse web project. One involves an auto-generated EAR and the other an auto-generated WAR. With either option any time I changed a JSP the auto publishing feature kicked in to rebuild the auto-generated artifact (including compilation) and to re-publish to the server. For any project of a decent size (the most common kind out there) this is completely useless, not to mention unnecessary. Furthermore the republished EAR somehow managed to consistently exhaust the connection pool.
So the only thing the plugin seems to be good for is to start and stop Weblogic from within Eclipse and possibly in debug mode. Both of these I can do just as easily and more reliably from the command line. So why isn’t there an option for deploying my web project in exploded form so that a JSP change is a simple file copy? Wouldn’t that be the simplest default?
For all the “high-end” features an application server like WebLogic provides it’s amazing to me how long countless developers have to wait for each time they make a simple JSP change.