I am at my end. I spend more time getting my build to work, rather than developing software. I am currently working on a large-scale Java web application based on Tomcat 6.
Currently, the codebase is about 25 thousand LOCs (although this is not entirely representative because some of them are auto-generated for web services, but it distracts that it is large) and I worked exclusively with eclipse to do everything from debugging to create road management for construction. Eclipse used to be always more than enough, but I had never before worked on a project that was so big.
The first problem I encountered was when I started adding GWT content. It worked fine, but the build process was a bit hacky: I had to manually compile and then copy the js output to the appropriate directory, and debugging was a nightmare (I understand that some of these problems are just GWT and the way it works ..). Now the problem I am facing is trying to work on a project on a Windows computer (I worked on a Mac and will continue to work with the Mac from time to time). Eclipse has added Mac OS JVM libraries to the build path, which, of course, Windows cannot find.
I asked a question about working in two different environments , and most of the answers related to using a build tool like Ant + Ivy or Maven. I started exploring Maven and tried to use my project, but this is only one headache after another, and I did not even start trying to actually execute / debug my application in Tomcat via eclipse. The most frustrating part of all this is that it seems to me that these building tools are extremely complex (and to be fair, incredibly flexible), but at least initially, make life even more difficult while you try to understand how easy it is to compile Java file.
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