User Experience: NetBeans Java EE 5 Usability Study, Deployment

Attendees:
Anissa Lam, Jan Rojcek, Petr Jiricka, Hong Zhang, Tim Quinn, Anil Guar, Jagadesh Mumta, Vince Kraemer, Peter Williams, Nazrul Islam

Summary:

• NetBeans Java EE 5 Usability Study:
  • 8 Participants participated in the study.
  • Suggestions for GlassFish team
    • Application Server stack trace is not very useful for the developers. Stop showing them in the UI and web browser.
    • Need better integration of how we show server log in NetBeans.
    • Review server log structure with HIE.
    • Focus on deployment error messages.
  • Reported bugs:
    • Fixed:
      • http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74722
      • http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74700
      • http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74719
    • Wontfix:
      • http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74710
• Deployment
  • In GlassFish v2, deployment team is planning to improve performance, error messages.
  • Look into deployment, redeployment and EE deployment performance.
  • Work with IDE and avoid reloading deployment descriptor.
  • Will work with netbeans team to use directory deployment for all archives. Currently, the netbeans use this for only web module.
  • For deployment error messages, team will focus on ...
    • Propagating correct status and root cause back to clients properly.
    • Provide better meaningful, diagnostic message.
    • Encourage everyone to file issues when error messages are not clear.
  • Support auto deploy of resources
  • Support deployment of other archives - JBI, SIP, Phobos, Ruby
  • Provide a sample for JSR88

Open Issues:

• Followup on items (22, 32) related to deployment - Hong

Hong's follow up notes on this:

1. EE-22: Deployment error message not understood

In this case, the error message from deployment code seems giving the proper information. The main issue seems like the wrapping of the text.

I see this netbeans issue http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74710 for this (and I've quoted some messages from the bug report):

''There is a popup on output tab to "Wrap Text".
The user can activate it. Now the IDE does not provide a programatic API to turn this on, so the plugin cannot set it up. Open a different bug on openide APIs is you want the wrapping to be done by default, or if we need an API so that the plugin can turn it on.''

Seems if we really want to get this fixed, we would need an openside API.
One thing we could do from the deployment side is maybe adding line breaks in long messages.

2. EE-32: Not clear error about database not running

The netbeans issue http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi-74722

And there is a separate glassfish issue https://github.com/javaee/glassfish/issues/525 filed for this which is marked fix.

However, based on the information in the issue, the better error message part is not fixed yet. I will re-open the issue for the better error message part and assign to cmp team since the error message seems coming out of the cmp code.

• Need better integration of how we show server log in NetBeans - Vince, Peter
• Follow-up on if locked jars can be overwritten in Windows 2K OS - Tim
• Similar to Tomcat, consider providing a unified deployment manager/facility from GlassFish. Users should not be required to use many different interfaces. - Hong