THIS IS A TEST INSTANCE. ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST!!!!
An integrated development environment (IDE) provides facilities for software development and typically consists of editors for editing source code, a compiler, project management tools, build automation tools and debugging tools. IDEs help in increasing the productivity by automating many tasks and often provide one-step process for creating a ready to use binary from source code. Eclipse and NetBeans are two of the most popular IDEs. IDEs that enable Java EE development also provide integration of Java EE Server runtime environments so that the developer can quickly see the effect of the changes being made to the application without having to create the binaries explicitly.
The Apache Geronimo Development Tools project is aimed at providing a rich set of development tools for Geronimo, focusing on application development, migration and IDE integration. The two major tools available currently are Geronimo Eclipse Plugin (GEP) and JBoss to Geronimo Migration Tool (J2G). Also, a Geronimo NetBeans Plugin is under development in Geronimo Sandbox. This article on setting up a development environment is organized as given below:
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Options and tools
In this section we briefly discuss various tools available to set up a development environment.
Eclipse
Eclipse is an open source IDE for Java developers and consists of Java Development Tools. Eclipse is written primarily in Java. Eclipse community is focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. Users can extend its functionality by installing plugins written for Eclipse. For more details visit Eclipse web site.
NetBeans
NetBeans is an open source IDE written entirely in Java using the NetBeans platform. NetBeans IDE provides all the tools needed for creating desktop, enterprise web and mobile applications in Java. For more details visit NetBeans web site.
Apache Maven
Apache Maven is a Java tool for software project management and automation for Java. It uses project object model to describe the software project being built, its dependencies on other external modules and components, and the build order. It comes with pre-defined targets for performing certain well defined tasks such as compilation of code and its packaging. Maven consists of a core engine which provides basic project-processing capabilities and build-process management, and a host of plugins which are used to execute the actual build tasks. Maven is primarily a command-line tool. Plugins to integrate Maven with Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs are also available. For more details visit Apache Maven web site.
Web Tools Platform (WTP)
The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project extends the Eclipse platform with tools for developing Web and Java EE applications. It includes source and graphical editors for a variety of languages, wizards and built-in applications to simplify development, and tools and APIs to support deploying, running, and testing applications. For more details visit WTP Project web site.
Geronimo Eclipse Plugin
The Geronimo Eclipse Plugin (GEP) provides integration between Geronimo and the Web Tools Platform (WTP). With this plugin, users will be able to use the features in WTP to create, deploy and debug applications on Geronimo.
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Geronimo server can be installed from within Geronimo Eclipse Plugin. This feature does not work currently for 2.1 server. Download Geronimo 2.1 server from http://www.apache.org/dist/geronimo/ and extract the archive to a directory of your choice (for e.g. C:\g). The archive will be extracted to a directory geronimo-tomcat6-javaee5-2.1 (for e.g. C:\g\geronimo-tomcat6-javaee5-2.1) or geronimo-jetty6-javaee5-2.1 depending on whether you downloaded Geronimo 2.1 distribution with Tomcat or Jetty as the web container. We will refer to this directory as <geronimo_home> from now on.
JBoss to Geronimo Migration Tool (J2G)
The JBoss to Geronimo Migration Tool (J2G) is an Eclipse plugin designed to assist in migrating the sources of an application written for the JBoss application server or written for Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) to the Apache Geronimo platform.
Installing Eclipse
The prerequisite software for GEP can be downloaded either as a single download or individual downloads. In this section we discuss the various options available to install the prerequisite software.
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