Deploying to Glassfish via Eclipse

Question

I have set up a project inside Eclipse which I can debug on a Glassfish (3.1) server using the Eclipse Glassfish plugin. So when I click 'Debug on server', it uploads fine and I am able to step through the code correctly etc.

The problem is that I don't know if the program is being compiled/build (to a new .war) each time I press debug. I have got an Ant script in the project (as I previously built the project via terminal) but I'm not sure if it is actually being used in Eclipse.

Is there any way to check if my ant script is being run? Also, how does Glassfish know what resources to upload? Does it just look for any .war files in the project?

Answer 1

Not sure about this particular jar plugin but as far as I know here is how Eclipse handles web applications:

• Eclipse automatically compiles all of the sources in the class path
• Then it creates a configuration file which tells Application Server to look for webapp on your project folder and does some mapping based on your project setup. This will not create a WAR file. Eclipse will just map WEB-INF/classes to {projectDir}/bin, your classpath jars to WEB-INF/lib and so on.
• When launching the Application Server, eclipse will feed it the config file made above.

Actually answering your question: Eclipse will not use the Ant script you created, nor will it create a WAR of any kind. It will just use project configuration to properly map project folders to web application structure.

Again, this is how eclipse handles things by default, the plugin you're using might do something different. This is based on my experience and is not based on some kind of documentation.