Weblogic Split Directory Environment

The WebLogic split development directory environment consists of a directory layout and associated Ant tasks that help you repeatedly build, change, and deploy J2EE applications. Using the split directory structure speeds-up the deployment time by avoiding unnecessary copying of files. In the split directory structure, the application directories are split into source and build directories.

• The source directory contains the Java source files, deployment descriptors, JSPs etc. along with static content.
• The build directory contains files generated during the build process.

The source directory is organized as follows:

root (represents the ear)
|_ EJB Modules/web modules
|_ Application Deployment descriptor (application.xml)
|_ Shared utility classes
|_ Common libraries shared by the different modules.

The split development directory structure requires each project to be staged as a J2EE Enterprise Application. BEA recommends that you stage even stand-alone Web applications and EJBs as modules of an Enterprise application, to benefit from the split directory Ant tasks.

Deploying from a Split Development Directory
All WebLogic Server deployment tools (weblogic.Deployer, wldeploy, and the Admin Console) support direct deployment from a split development directory. When an application is deployed to WebLogic Server, the server attempts to use all classes and resources available in the source directory for deploying the application. The server looks in the build directory only for the resources not available in the source directory.

Ant Tasks
The following is a list of Ant tasks that help you deploy applications using the split development directory environment.

• wlcompile—This Ant task compiles the contents of the source directory into subdirectories of the build directory.
• wlappc—Used to generate JSPs and container-specific EJB classes for deployment.
• wldeploy—Deploys any format of J2EE applications (exploded or archived) to WebLogic Server. To deploy directly from the split development directory environment, you specify the build directory of your application.
• wlpackage—Used to generate an EAR file or exploded EAR directory from the source and build directories.

After you set up your source directory structure, use the weblogic.BuildXMLGen utility to create a basic build.xml file. The syntax for weblogic.BuildXMLGen is as follows:

java weblogic.BuildXMLGen [options] 

After running weblogic.BuildXMLGen, edit the generated build.xml file to specify properties for your development environment.

Summary
The following steps illustrate how you use the split development directory structure to build and deploy a WebLogic Server application.

1. Create the main EAR source directory for your project. When using the split development directory environment, you must develop Web Applications and EJBs as part of an Enterprise Application, even if you do not intend to develop multiple J2EE modules.
2. Add one or more subdirectories to the EAR directory for storing the source for Web Applications, EJB components, or shared utility classes.
3. Store all of your editable files (source code, static content, editable deployment descriptors) for modules in subdirectories of the EAR directory.
4. Set your WebLogic Server environment by executing either the setWLSEnv.cmd (Windows) or setWLSEnv.sh (UNIX) script. The scripts are located in the WL_HOME\server\bin\ directory, where WL_HOME is the top-level directory in which WebLogic Server is installed.
5. Use the weblogic.BuildXMLGen utility to generate a default build.xml file for use with your project. Edit the default property values as needed for your environment.
6. Use the default targets in the build.xml file to build, deploy, and package your application.