[ANN] Jetty Integration Plug-in

Jetty Integration Plug-in version 0.1.0 is available for download using
IDEA's internal Plugin Manager or directly from the IDEA plug-ins
website at http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1311.

The plug-in requires IDEA 6.0 (i.e. build 5766) or newer and supports
Jetty 6.1.0 or newer (see below for an explanation of this requirement).
The IDEA 'until' build number has been set to 6999 as (minimal) testing
with Selena build 6667 revealed no problems.

The plug-in is released under the terms of version 2.0 of the Apache
licence and source code is both included with the binary distribution
and available separately via the IDEA plug-ins website.

Users who have configured IDEA to use Tomcat for web application
deployment should have no trouble following the same process to use Jetty.

1. IDE Settings -> Application Servers

Use the Add button to open the Jetty Server dialog and browse to the
Jetty installation location. The dialog will indicate the Jetty version
detected and prevent unsupported versions from being selected.

A minimal set of libraries from the Jetty installation is attached to
the application server definition but IDEA allows this to be freely
edited. This may be configurable at application server definition time
in future releases.

2. Run -> Edit Configurations... (or use the toolbar dropdown control)

The Run/Debug Configurations dialog allows local and remote Jetty Server
configurations to be created.

Jetty 6.1.0 or newer is required since hot (un)deployment of web
contexts is not supported in earlier versions. However, the plug-in
does not yet make use of this feature, so a web module war file or
exploded directory must be built and deployed prior to using an IDEA
Run/Debug configuration to launch Jetty.

The suggested way to work for now is to use the Java EE Build Settings
tab (on the Project Structure dialog) for the web modules you'd like to
deploy to create a war file or exploded directory directly in Jetty's
'webapps' directory (i.e. in $/webapps). Hotswap will work
while debugging but hot deployment/undeployment will not. The node
shown on the Debug toolwindow's Console tab for each web module will
currently always indicate its status as 'unknown' (i.e. will show the
icon containing a question mark).

The plug-in includes platform-specific scripts for starting and stopping
Jetty. Unfortunately, the Jetbrains plug-in manager has undone work to
preserve the execute bit on the Unix/Linux shell script in the uploaded
zip archive. Users on Unix(-like) systems should manually set the
execute bit on:

${idea.plugins.path}/JettyIntegration/bin/jetty.sh

If the execute bit is not set then launching a run or debug
configuration will result in IDEA reporting an error.

I'm only personally able to test on GNU/Linux (my preference, and the
plug-in's development platform) and XP. My knowledge of DOS batch files
is extremely limited so the jetty.bat file included with the plug-in can
most probably be improved (although it seems to work just fine). I'd be
very grateful for feedback from any Mac users who try the plug-in as to
whether or not the jetty.sh script works for them.

Feedback and feature requests are welcome and encouraged, either in this
newsgroup/forum or via email (to the address in my sig or in the plug-in
details).

Already planned for future releases:

- support for hot deployment/undeployment;
- shared use of a (possibly read-only) Jetty installation amongst
multiple developers.

More ambitious possibilities include a UI to support generation/editing
of Jetty's configuration files (jetty.xml etc.), along the lines of
IDEA's existing UI for web.xml.

--
Mark Scott
mark@codebrewer.com