vs_appengine.md

bazville > Compare with rules_appengine

The official support of Java web application in Bazel is bazelbuild/rules_appengine. This table below explains how bazville works differently from rules_appengine.

	rules_appengine	bazville
Requires appengine.xml	Yes	No
Requires web.xml	No	No
Adds appengine jar libraries to webapp	Yes	No
Runs with	Google appengine	Tomcat
//a/static:file.js goes to	<root>/file.js	<root>/a/static/file.js
@npm//:node_modules/a/file.js goes to	<root>/file.js	<root>/external/npm/node_modules/a/file.js

A key difference is that bazville preserves the file structure of sources in a web application, while rules_appengine flattens out all the files, places them to the root of the web application, and ignores their original file structure. Files with the same name from multiple locations would collide with rules_appengine and be handled correctly by bazville.