oVirt Webadmin GWT Debug Quick Refresh

As a developer, one drawback of using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the oVirt Administration Portal (aka webadmin) is that the GWT compile process takes an exceptionally long time. If you make a change in some code and rebuild the ovirt-engine project using make install-dev ..., you'll be waiting several minutes to test your change. In practice, such a long delay in the usual code-compile-refresh-test cycle would be unbearable.

Luckily, we can use GWT Super Dev Mode ("SDM") to start up a quick refresh-capable instance of the application. With SDM running, you can make a change in GWT and test the refreshed change within seconds.

If you want to step through code and use the Chrome debugger, oVirt and SDM don't work well together for debugging due to the oVirt Administration Portal's code and source map size. Therefore, below we demonstrate how to disable source maps.

Demo (40 seconds)

Steps

1. Open a terminal, build the engine normally, and start it.

   ``` make clean install-dev PREFIX=$HOME/ovirt-engine DEV_EXTRA_BUILD_FLAGS_GWT_DEFAULTS="-Dgwt.cssResourceStyle=pretty -Dgwt.userAgent=safari" BUILD_UT=0 DEV_EXTRA_BUILD_FLAGS="-Dgwt.compiler.localWorkers=1"

   …

   $HOME/ovirt-engine/share/ovirt-engine/services/ovirt-engine/ovirt-engine.py start

   ```

   

   

   

2. In a second terminal, run:

   Chrome:

   make gwt-debug DEV_BUILD_GWT_SUPER_DEV_MODE=1 DEV_EXTRA_BUILD_FLAGS_GWT_DEFAULTS="-Dgwt.userAgent=safari"

   or

   Firefox:

   make gwt-debug DEV_BUILD_GWT_SUPER_DEV_MODE=1 DEV_EXTRA_BUILD_FLAGS_GWT_DEFAULTS="-Dgwt.userAgent=gecko1_8"

   

   Wait about two minutes Continue reading