Just Push a Single Button to Update and Restart New Apps
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I clicked the link on the page and realized Id made a mistake in the address of the link. I received a 404 error. So I went back to Eclipse and made the change in my index.jsp file.
Then I wasnt sure how to update my change to the server. But once I discovered it, I found that this was the easiest part of the entire deployment process. Next to the application list is an Update and Restart button. I clicked it, and thats all. With that single click of a button, my updates got uploaded to the server. I didnt have to do anything else. I then refreshed the page in Chrome, did a view-source, and could see my change. Clicking on the link, I saw my Hello Cloud Foundry Servlet message.
By now, things were going extremely well, except there was one feature missing. I saw in the instructions that in the original deployment, if Id chosen a local Microcloud running in a VMware Player, I would have remote debugging capabilities. But that option isnt there when your application is hosted on the CloudFoundry.com Website as was my case.
As a professional Web developer, I know that remote debugging is missing from a lot of platforms, or if its present, it doesnt work well. So we learn to live without it, debugging locally and using raw creativity and sheer brainpower to figure out whats wrong when something doesnt work on the server but does locally. But in this case, I was disappointed to see it missing primarily because of a review I wrote for eWEEK three years ago.
Amazon Web Services has an Eclipse Extension that works very similarly to this Cloud Foundry one. You can create your Java Web application and deploy it to Amazons servers right from within Eclipse. And that extension includes remote debugging.
Nevertheless, I would not use that as a reason to switch away from Cloud Foundry to AWS. Instead, I would recommend using the Cloud Foundry extension, but do your development locally, probably against the free and open-source Tomcat server that you can install on your own machine.
Or you can even install the Micro Cloud Foundry and debug against that, by setting up two servers from within Eclipseone for the local Micro version and one for the remote CloudFoundry.com version. Then, when youre ready to deploy, click that one button I was telling you about, and youll be good to go. It works, and it works well. As a result, I definitely give this product a thumbs-up.
