One of the enhancements I have been working on will hopefully ease some of this burden by providing a “navigator” similar to the Eclipse Project Explorer, but designed specifically for Drools/jBPM projects (see below).
At the root of this tree viewer are the app servers that have Drools/jBPM installed. Servers are managed (start, stop, debug) from the WST Servers view. At the next level is the Organizational Unit, then Repositories and finally Projects. Essentially, this viewer mimics the web console with the addition of multiple servers.
The tree structure is cached whenever a connection to the server can be established. This allows the view to be used in “offline” mode if the server is down or network connection is unavailable. When the server is available again, the viewer synchronizes its cache with the server.
Repositories are automatically cloned, and Projects are imported as they are requested by the user with a context menu action.
I’m still in the design/experimenting phase right now, so if there’s a feature you’d like to see, or if you have suggestions for improving this interface please post your comments here.
You can also see a related post, showing my work on improving the wizards and runtime generation and configuration.