• WSAD can mess up your deployment descriptor when you are refactoring, especially the proprietary ones (.xmi)
  • WAS is very poor at reporting low level exceptions: UnsatisfiedLinkError when a driver needs a shared library, errors when a .xmi is wrong, etc.
  • deleting all the .xmi when something wierd happens and let WSAD rebuild them is A Good Idea
  • WAS doesn't seem to like when you provide to others components classes and jars in a same jar. But, it seems to accept several jars inside a jar. The way to do this in WSAD is to create a Java project without sources files, import all the jar in it, and say that they are all exported. Keep your files that need compilation in another project.
  • A good way to test if you have an IBM specific problem (well, it works most of the time), is to drop your EAR in the deploy directory of the default server config of JBoss 3.