Sysadmin Field Notes

October 21, 2004

So weblogic 8.1 provides you with a fancy "split directory structure" which allows you to avoid copying your static content and jsps around to develop. Fairly cool really, but it's managed through two ant tasks, wlcompile and then for deployment wlpackage.



Part of the split directory structure and these tasks is that they assume every subdirectory of where you point the source root is part of the application. So if you want the natural arrangement with most of your source and files right off the root of your checkout, it assumes your database directory, your "build" and "dist" location directories, and anything else you store in there is a J2EE module. Annoying, but in wlcompile you can specify includes and excludes to get around ths. One would think it would be only natural to have the same capability for wlpackage when it's time to deploy your app.


But alas, it's totally brain dead. It sucks up everything from your source root and includes it. So you get your test source code, your database scripts, development tools, even your build.xml all in your EAR that's supposedly going to production. And there's no (documented way at least) to exclude anything from it.



So you spend a pile of money on an expensive app server and you -still- get to muck around with ant's jar/ear tasks to pull the files you need. Thrilling. Even if you follow their example to the letter, you get -everything- included in your production .EAR. They have hardcoded exlcudes for build.xml and .beabuild.txt apparently, but that's it. So unless you decide to be slave to thier organization and put the bulk of your code in a clean subdir off your source root, wlpackage is uselss. Would it really have been that hard to add "includes" and "excludes"?