Sometimes I can’t help but getting nostalgic when I think about the old days when Microsoft Visual Studio was the benchmark for Integrated Development Environments. Back then when I used Visual C++ 2.0 the first time, I immediately fell in love with it. The IDE ran under Windows NT (I refused to use Windows 3.1 and 95 for anything productive), had an excellent editor and kick-ass debugger, was fast, and just did what it was supposed to do without getting in my way. The following releases improved on that foundation and introduced features such as IntelliSense, incremental Compilation and minimal Rebuild. Everything was good in Developer Land.
Unfortunately, all of that ended with the release of Visual Studio .Net 2002. This was the first release which introduced support for the .Net Framework in the IDE. Don’t get me wrong. I still regard the .Net Framework as one of Microsoft’s better products, but this post is about Visual Studio and the impact the framework plus other contributing factors had on the quality of IDE. Visual Studio .Net 2002 took approximately two hours to install on my relatively powerful workstation. After that, when I was allowed to launch the IDE, the greatly increased startup time was immediately noticeable. But hey that’s the price you got to pay for all those shiny new features right?
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I’ve spent the past week juggling with GWT, Maven 2, Eclipse, Jetty 6 and Tomcat 6. My goal was:
- Run GWT hosted mode using noserver switch in order to use my own application server / container. The reason for this was that I wanted to experiment with Jetty 6’s continuations and Tomcat 6’s Cometprocessor servlet interface
- Keep full debugging support for both server and client code in Eclipse in noserver mode
- Fully automated command line builds, packing and deployments using Maven
Switching to noserver hosted mode in GWT has a couple of implications. When using the -noserver flag, your external server is used by the GWT Hosted Mode browser to serve up both your dynamic content, and all static content (such as the GWT application’s host page, other HTML files, images, CSS, and so on.). GWT’s internal Tomcat is no longer used. This also means that you are totally on your own with everything happening on the server side.
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