I was recently interested to take a look what’s inside the TomEE app server.

We’re using it “heavily” in production. I was interested how some stuff was done.

The great stuff what it’s just a usual maven project. Actually all the info can be found here – http://tomee.apache.org/dev/source-code.html but step by step instruction may be of a help.

So I’ve started from getting the source with executing
git clone https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/tomee.git tomee

Before importing the project into IDE a very good idea is to make a full build by calling

mvn -Dsurefire.useFile=false -DdisableXmlReport=true -DuniqueVersion=false -ff -Dassemble -DskipTests -DfailIfNoTests=false clean install

It will take a while, it will download all the dependencies and build TomEE without executing all the tests. Something that pleased me a lot is there is no need for any other special setup.

The integration with IDE is also quite seamless.

In IntelliJ Idea for example Just import the project from POM:

Then check ALL:

and in about 30 min you will get fully indexed working environment:

For Eclipse its almost the same. First import existing maven project into workspace:

Eclipse finally supports hierarchical maven projects:

And we are done!

A good idea may be to select hierarchical project representation of the project 🙂

The TomEE team has done a great job to make the development setup extremely simple! Within just few action you can start developing for TomEE.

KUDOS to the team!