It occurs to me that the APP_HOME concept is a bit like setting the dev home location when building the tip. I'm sure I'm missing a detail or two, but essentially it's 2 things:

1. Compiling pods to an alternate location
2. Loading pods at runtime from that location

I know there was some question about implementing this one? Could you guys elaborate on it? The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to extend tradewinds such that you can deploy a fan app "natively" in glassfish like you can with jruby on rails apps (deploying the app dir) rather than needing to bundle it up in a war file and without APP_HOME support that's not entirely possible.

I am 100% in agreement that the current design doesn't cut it. But everytime I start to hack something I realize that I really don't grok the bigger picture (web based, local repos, etc), various config options, etc. So I'm definitely not feeling like I have a solid design to move forward.

could you outline the bumps you've hit and I can see how things look from the perspective of what I'm trying? perhaps we can iron out the wrinkles and move forward. I'd love to see this feature done soon and now that I can finally build the tip again, I'm more than willing to submit what patches I can.

Ok let me give it some thought and let's try to nail down the design this week