Single Freeform vs. multiple Jee App Projects, or both?

[Michael Meier]

Hi,

I have begun to implement a system in JEE 5. It consists of several
nested subsystems who each contain several JEE applications with
one or more ejb war or appclient modules.

For now, I have written a build system manually using ant. This is to
have a reproducible build on our build server.

In Netbeans, I use this handwritten ant file to define a free-from
project. So, this freeform project includes a directory called apps
(the directory structure adheres to the Sun blueprint project structure).
and this directory includes a nested subdirectory structure containing
the source of JEE applications.

I did not use Netbeans to compile, debug etc. the code, but typed the
ant commands into a shell.

But now, I would like to use the debugging and later also the profiling
features of netbeans.

So, which is the best route to go:

- Try to get the single freeform-project to debug numerous different
applications (from the same software system)?
- Throw away the manually written ant build system and replace it with
a Netbeans project for every JEE Application?
- Add a netbeans project for every JEE Application in addition to the
handwritten build system and do separate builds independantly from each
other?

This cannot be an uncommon scenario: Every time somebody uses Netbeans
to write a hge software system consisting of numerous JEE applications,
within a team which uses a build server, this issue has to come up?

Unfortunately, I did not find any documentation regarding netbeans or
at the blueprints project. Does anybody have a hint or could point
me to a documentation location, please?

Thanks a lot!
Best regards,
mike.