M.E.T.A. development modes

To suit the different styles of Turbine developers, M.E.T.A. allows you to choose between various directory layouts for your application.

The following modes are currently supported:

  • normal - Your application is developed outside the container tree. It must be deployed to the container by running the turbine:deploy goal.
  • inplace - The source code and the class files are kept together . Your web container will access the files in the development location and no explicit deployment to the container is necessary. This mode is similar to developing with the deprecated Turbine Development Kit.

Selecting a Development Mode

The development mode is selected by providing the turbine.plugin.mode property in either the setup.properties file or on the maven command line when using Ad Hoc setup. 

Build an inplace development skeleton:
maven -Dturbine.app.name=inplace -Dturbine.plugin.mode=inplace turbine:setup

The default mode is the Normal development mode which needs the turbine:deploy target to deploy the application to a web container.

Development Modes

normal

This is the recommended mode to develop a Turbine application. It keeps the source files separate from the generated and compiled files. The development tree conforms to the maven common directory layout. 

.
|-- conf
`-- src
    |-- images
    |-- java
    |   `-- org
    |       `-- apache
    |           `-- turbine
    |               `-- app
    |                   `-- helloworld
    |                       `-- modules
    |                           |-- actions
    |                           |-- layouts
    |                           |-- navigations
    |                           |-- pages
    |                           `-- screens
    |-- pages
    |-- resources
    |-- schema
    |-- scripts
    |-- style
    |-- templates
    |   |-- layouts
    |   |-- macros
    |   |-- navigations
    |   `-- screens
    `-- test

inplace

This mode is suitable when moving from the Turbine Development Kit to M.E.T.A. or when you can customize your web container to access your development location. Its tree layout is directly usable as a web application.

An application that has been set up with this mode can be loaded into an IDE, e.g. Eclipse. Please refer to the IDE Reference on how to do this. 

.
|-- WEB-INF
|   |-- conf
|   |-- src
|   |   `-- org
|   |       `-- apache
|   |           `-- turbine
|   |               `-- app
|   |                   `-- helloworld
|   |                       `-- modules
|   |                           |-- actions
|   |                           |-- layouts
|   |                           |-- navigations
|   |                           |-- pages
|   |                           `-- screens
|   `-- test
|-- images
|-- pages
|-- resources
|-- scripts
|-- src
|   `-- schema
|-- style
`-- templates
    |-- layouts
    |-- macros
    |-- navigations
    `-- screens