Develop Reference

AppEngine Dynamic WebProject - Ear libraries not copied to War Project Web-INF/lib folder

I have a Ear Project which includes two Appengine Dynamic Web Project and one shared java project (which has common classes).
I have added shared java project to EarContent Folder through Deployment assembly settings in EAR Project and i can see the java project jar file in published folder under EarContent folder.
Now i wanted to use the Ear library in Dynamic Web Project, so i have added this library in MANIFEST.MF setting for both the project and at compile time i can access the class from shared project too.
The problem is when i publish it, i couldn't able to find the java project jar in Both Web Project, i have tried almost every settings but nothing was helpful.
Am using Eclipse Mars, AppEngine SDK version 1.9.10,
Does any one tried this, is there any possible solution for my problem. any thoughts or suggestion is highly appreciated.
Thanks!

It looks like the Google Plugin for Eclipse doesn't recognize anything in EarContent/lib (or whatever your EAR library path is) regardless of settings when packaging the WAR files for each Dynamic Web Project. The JARs need to be physically present in WEB-INF/lib for each Dynamic Web Project in order for the modules to deploy properly.
I would recommend opening a feature request in the official issue tracker here:
https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/FilingIssues

Using maven instead of ant with SPRING, deploying and structure

I have a spring project and using ANT to compile/deploy my war to Tomcat. So basically it just creates a war file and moves it to tomcat folder.
folder structure is this:
Spring
-src
ALL MY SRC (JAVA) files
-war
-WEB-INF
-jsp
-lib
ALL MY LIBRARIES
-properties
web.xml
spring-servlet.xml
-META-INF
build.xml
pom.xml // putting my pom.xml here
With ant I download all my libraries manually. Now as it seems, maven downloads all libraries automatically, thanks to pom.xml. Questions/problems:
Must I change my folder structure with maven?
Will maven include all downloaded libs to WAR? Is that default?
When maven downloads its WARS, can it put all libraries to WEB-INF/lib? How?
Does it make sense what I am doing, if no, then why?
Have few questions, because I have never ever used maven.

Yes better change the structure, see the maven site. It saves a bit of hassle, should you start using maven-plugins with complex things like using XSLT to generate java sources. Also IDE support might be better. Like:
src/main/java, src/test/java, src/main/resources.
Yes.
Yes. Automagically.
Yes otherwise you should use Ivy with ant.

Standard Maven Web Project Structure
As millimoose commented its better to go for standard project structure.

Java classpath for dynamic web project

Hi all i have very rare problem which needs to be solved.
Problem/issue:
I have a dynamic web project which is already built and i have war file of that project.
I need to apply some customizations on top of the war file given to me.
Using maven or ant am able to compile the custom code written by me and able to add produced class files to the war file.
But the this is happening for final war file build.
when i want to test my code in eclipse. the war file build and deployed in jboss plugin contains only the class files produced out of java files written by me..........
Please help me how can i modify the .classpath file of my project so that a jboss publish can build a war file using the dependent war file which can run on eclipse-jboss to test my custom code....
Advance Thanks.....

Not a rare problem.
What you need to combine two web applications (wars) together. You have your customization war on which you need to overlay the existing web application.
It looks like you have already solved it from build perspective and looking for Eclipse support. To my knowledge, Eclipse lacks support for this. You probably need to manually do the necessary configuration to make this happen.

It looks strange to me to have two WAR files.
Perhaps you have to consider to package your customizations in a JAR and inserting that jar in the original WAR file.
Otherwise, another solution, and what I do often with open-source project to customize is to have three projects in your workspace.
PRJ-src (with your original sources/JAR/WAR)
PRJ-custom (which depends of the previous one); This project contains only the new classes or custom spring xml files (with injection of my own classes)
PRJ (the merge of the two previous projects)
I create an Ant task in the 3rd project which takes the 1st project (PRJ-src) and merge with the 2nd project (PRJ-custom). This is possible to do so with Maven as well.
Then this is the only project I deploy in my app server (tomcat / jboss).

Automating build process for a web application created in Eclipse

I have an eclipse Tomcat project that has several dependencies on other eclipse projects.
For example imagine the main project is called server and has several dependencies:
server
(depends on):
data-lib
server-utils
messaging-utils
Currently every time I change data-lib,server-utils,messaging-utils I have to recreate the .jar file and copy it into WEB-INF/lib directory of server. At that point I export the server as a .war and deploy to my server.
I want to make this process work from the cmd line using ant (note I know maven is out there but I know ant pretty well from past experience so would prefer sticking to it for now). Its easy enough to create the build file for server -- it will end up creating a .war file. But I want it to automatically build the dependent libs. I want to do this while preserving my development workspace in Eclipse.
What is the easiest and cleanest way to do this? Currently my thought is each individual project will have its own build.xml (i.e. data-lib/build.xml , server-utils/build.xml , etc). I will have the server/build.xml do an antcall to these individual build files and then copy the jars to the server/WEB-INF/lib directory.
Is there an easier/better way?

if you want an Ant based script, I would go with Apache Ivy. The basic idea is that each of your submodule has its own build.xml file and publishes (via Ivy) their "publications" (like a Jar file) to a repository on the file system. The other modules then import these "publications" to build the final product.

I am not sure if it can help you, but in your WAR project, right-click on it in Package Explorer, and click on Properties.
There is a "J2EE Module Dependencies". In this option, select all of the dependencies (i.e. "data-lib", "server-utils" and "messaging-utils").
Now, when you modify a Java class in one of the dependencies, Eclipse will recreate the JAR file and deploy it directly in the WEB-INF/lib of your web application.

Eclipse debug-time classpath problem: How do you include a dependent project's output into a web project's runtime classpath?

So I started with a web services project (just a dynamic web project) that builds and debugs correctly from eclipse. We've pulled a chunk of common code out that we want to put into a shared library so now those classes are going into a separate jar project that the web project references.
On the web project, I did Project->Properties->Java Build Path->Projects->Add and added the jar project. And this correctly solved all the compile-time classpath problems and everything builds fine. But at runtime, when the tomcat server fires up, spring attempts to inject some of the classes contained in the jar file and I get a NoClassDefFoundError.
My .class and properties files and the contents of my META-INF directory are showing up in the ./build directory, but my WEB-INF/lib directory seems to be referenced in-place, and the jar dependency doesn't get copied in to it to show up as part of the Web App Library.
What is the magical incantation to tell eclipse that the other jar project needs to be available to tomcat at runtime? From our ant build script, we first just build the other project into WEB-INF/lib and everything works fine, but not for eclipse debugging.

I figured this out after spending some time on it. If you are in Eclipse Helios , go to properties > deployment assembly > add > project and select the dependent project you wish to add.

Java EE module dependencies would solve this problem.
You have already done the task of extracting your common classes into its own project, possibly because other projects depend on these classes. Either way, you'll have to ensure that this is a Utility project (appears under Java EE in the project wizards), and not just a plain Java project.
One that is done, you can proceed to add the Utility project to your build path (compile-time path) as you have figured out.
The additional (final) step is to establish a Java EE module dependency between your Dynamic Web project and the shared library, which causes the utility's classes to be placed in WEB-INF\lib during deployment, and even during export of the WAR. To do so, visit the dynamic web project's properties, and browse to the Java EE module dependencies. Ensure that your utility project is selected here. Redeploy/publish your application and you should be good to go.