Creating or updating of Geronimo Deployment Plans has always been a tedious and erroneous task. As evident from the user mailing list, first time users (and sometimes even advanced users) have always had some issue or the other when it comes to correctly creating Geronimo deployment plans.

This wiki page is meant to propose means of simplifying the creation or updation of Geronimo deployment plans.

Proposal-1 by Shiva:
Geronimo Development Tools (like Geronimo Eclipse Plug-in) could be enhanced to provide the following tools for simplifying the creation or updation of AG deployment plans:
a) A Wizard to Auto Create Geronimo Deployment Plan by scanning the corresponding Java-EE plan/annotation:
Say for WARs this could be achieved by scanning web.xml (in case of J2EE 1.4) or corresponding annotations (in case of Java EE 5) and then running the user through a Wizard where he can specify the missing data.

b) Form based Editors for modifying Geronimo Deployment Plans:
Full fledged Form Based Editors for
i) geronimo-web.xml (WAR),
ii) openejb-jar.xml (EJB JAR),
iii) geronimo-ra.xml (J2EE Connector),
iv) geronimo-application-client.xml (Client Application) &
v) geronimo-application.xml (Enterprise Application)

c) Extensive user help in various Wizards during create/edit of Geronimo deployment plans
User help (like instructions and snippets of xml-elements that will be generated) to be added in each of the wizards. This help text could be integrated into the corrersponding schemas in <xs:documentation> elements and then extracted from within Wizards to generate user help.

d) Geronimo Specific Annotations
With the facility of Annotations bought with Java 5.0 arises a new possibility of approaching even Geronimo Deployment Plans with Annotations, with its own pros & cons. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@geronimo.apache.org/msg39672.html Need to further explore this path.

Proposal-2:
<please propose your ideas below>