Yesterday I had to create quickly a new Fatwire Project. This time, since I have CS 7.6 I decided to try CSDT (you know, the new Eclipse Plugin for eclipse development). But...
Well, the experience with CSDT did not live up to my expectation. Don't get me wrong: I think that CSDT is basically fine. However, it is not what I was looking for.
Here a few things I don't like.
First: it stores content in his own directory, that is NOT the Eclipse project directory. So I cannot really version control it, unless I create a separate repository and use the directory where CSDT stores files. While it is doable, it is a bit annoying (you wonder: why???)
Second annoyance: I configure it once using my local jump start. Now I am unable to change settings. I want to use indeed a different Content Server (accessible through a VPN). With CSDT once you have configured it, it looks like you cannot change that configuration anymore, unless you create a new workspace. Not sure why, but definitely annoying.
Last thing, I have to manually publish changes once in a while. While definitely not a big deal, it is annoying nonetheless, especially if I have the habit to see immediately the changes once I hit save in eclipse.
So, after this frustation I decided to come back to my FatStart. Well, actually I just picked the ElementDeployer, since I do not need the complete packaging power of FatStart. I only was looking for the ability to use eclipse to edit and deploying elements in the quickest possible way. Basically an eclipse replacement for ContentServer Explorer, more efficient that CSDT for this basic task (actually CSDT performs other tasks but I simply don't need them).
All I had to do is to create an eclipse project, copy in it the ElementDeployer (part of FatStart) and configure a link to the cs/WEB-INF directory. I also added a launcher script to perform deployments manually.
So basically I created a bare-bone eclipse project supporting ContentServer and able to edit jsp (with completion!) and deploy code changes when I save it.
I thought that this personal stuff can be useful for others, so I collected the eclipse project and I released it in my FatGoodies collections as "fatproject":
Checkout the code from here:
https://github.com/sciabarra/FatGoodies/tree/master/fatproject
Then import the project in Eclipse. If you have CSDT already configured, that is all; otherwise you will have to set up the eclipse variable "CS_CONTEXTDIR" to point to your local jumpstart "cs" directory.
Now, create your elements and templates. You have to follow a couple of conventions for naming them (see the doc). Then you can just launch the ElementDeployer class.
It will look for an ElementDeployer.prp file to read its settings then it will publish jsp (with extension .jspf please) to the Content Server you configured.
Then keep it running. Every time you change a file it is immediataly redeployed.
This is basically all I need to code with Fatwire if I don't have to distribute a complete package (for which FatStart is better suited).
Using this simple FatProject I am in a productive loop: I edit the content model in Fatwire and I save it, then I edit the code in Eclipse and I save it, and I am done: just reloading the page (well, don't forget to disable or clean the cache, anyway) I can see the results of my changes.
And I am happy!
(It took more time to write this blog post than to build fatproject actually)
