A few days ago, I tried to use the App Engine Eclipse plugin, but ran into some issues, as described in an earlier post. These were probably due to my lack of experience with Java, Eclipse, and/or the AppEngine dev model, but I was blocked all the same. This time, I’ll start at a lower level, with the App Engine Java SDK.

My first stop was the App Engine Java overview page, which suggests “… you haven’t already, see the Java Getting Started Guide …”, so I hopped over.

The steps outlined in Installing the Java SDK worked well, and I was able to launch the dev server.

Next, I created my first project, the Guestbook app. The steps here were helpful too, and I was able to compile the app successfully (via the Using Apache Ant documentation), but I ran into trouble when I tried to run it:

$ ant runserver
Unable to find a $JAVA_HOME at "/usr", continuing with system-provided Java...
Buildfile: build.xml

copyjars:

compile:

runserver:
[java] 2010-10-14 00:47:18.489 java[24218:903] [Java CocoaComponent compatibility mode]: Enabled
[java] 2010-10-14 00:47:18.492 java[24218:903] [Java CocoaComponent compatibility mode]: Setting timeout for SWT to 0.100000
[java] Oct 14, 2010 7:47:20 AM com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.JettyLogger info
[java] INFO: Logging to JettyLogger(null) via com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.JettyLogger
[java] Oct 14, 2010 7:47:20 AM com.google.apphosting.utils.config.AppEngineWebXmlReader readAppEngineWebXml
[java] SEVERE: Received exception processing /Users/foo/Sites/appengine/Guestbook/war/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml
[java] com.google.apphosting.utils.config.AppEngineConfigException: Could not locate /Users/foo/Sites/appengine/Guestbook/war/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml
...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds


The missing file is located in /Users/foo/Sites/appengine/Guestbook/war/WEB-INF/classes/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml, which seems to be intentional given the statement “All other files found in src/, such as the META-INF/ directory, are copied verbatim to war/WEB-INF/classes/”.

If I add the following to build.xml, so appengine-web.xml and web.xml are coped into the src/WEB-INF dir, then it works:

    <copy todir="war/WEB-INF">
      <fileset dir="src/WEB-INF">
      </fileset>
    </copy>

The next step would be to Using the Users Service, but it’s getting alte, and I’z getting seelpy, so I’ll save that for another day.

To conclude w/ something uplifting, here’s a pic of a sleeping hedgehog.