Equinox/RAP WAR deployment: an end to the pain

August 17, 2010 | 2 min Read

Please note: This post is outdated. Please read this post and do not follow the install instructions in this one.

A few weeks ago I presented you my GSoC 2010 project. The idea was to make Equinox/RAP WAR deployment easier. And yes, it was a real pain to create .war files for an Equinox/RAP application. About 215 deployment related threads on the RAP newsgroup speak for themselves. But the pain is over now, and I think I can say,  “Mission accomplished”.

I want to introduce you to a new concept called WAR Products. They are similar to Eclipse Products but much more lightweight. All you have to do to export a RAP application is to create a .warproduct based on a working launch configuration and press ’export’. The exported .war file is ready to deploy. There is a function included that validates your .war file content before you’ve exported it. If you don’t believe me,  watch the screencast below and see for yourself.

You can use the tooling right now, but please keep in mind that we are still polishing. The final goal is to contribute it back to PDE, but there are still a few things to do before we make the contribution.  One of those items is to get your initial feedback so when you use the WAR Products tooling, please be sure submit your feature requests or file bugs and help us to continue to improve the tooling.

Here is what you need to do to use the WAR Products tooling:

  1. Install the tooling from this repository into your IDE: https://download.eclipsesource.com/~hstaudacher/warproducts/3.7
  2. Set up your target. You need to add RAP 1.4 M5 or the Server-Side Equinox SDK.

Again, comments, bugs and feature requests are appreciated!

At this point I want to thank some people. First of all, Rüdiger Herrmann for great mentoring and the whole RAP team for all the nice evenings in the beer garden. Not to forget Simon Kaegi, Scott Lewis and Chris Aniszczyk and the rest of the Equinox and PDE teams for tuning up the Product concept. Your changes made things much easier.

And, I hope that you will find WAR deployment and creating WAR Products not just easier, but completely pain free!