Handling multiple artifacts from single maven project - apache-flex

I have a maven project that produces many artifacts. Of course it is kind of against maven best practice (one pom one artifact), but it is Adobe Flex project that produces many *swf modules and it is really makes no sence to create a separate project for each module.
For me it would be very convinient to handle all swf modules as a single zip archive eg. zip archive would be my artifact.
So I am looking for the way to pack and unpack my zip artifact with maven.
If you have any ideas, please share then with me.
Best regards,
Max

Answer: Maven Assembly Plugin
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/ and Maven Dependency Plugin http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/

Related

SOA MDS Target folder

I would like to understand what role the target folder plays in a SOA MDS project.
I am using JDeveloper and the target folder keeps getting populated with 2 .jar files. I am not sure where these jar files are coming from, but they contain old data which should be changed.
Can somebody please help me understand what is behind the making of these files?
The target folder is the default build output directory used by maven.
If working correctly, the builds should be generated there by maven using the configuration specified in the pom.xml file. In your case, the maven build might not have been run recently, which is why you see old content in the jars.
Have a look inside the pom.xml and see what build configuration has been specified there (it is likely to be no different from a SOA composite maven build file/pom file). If it's all built correctly, you should be able to deploy that jar directly to the MDS runtime (either manually or via maven).
In the pom file, you should be able to override most things there including the name, version, bundle type, target directory etc.
You can also use maven to keep track of your MDS changes - i.e. version it like any other build artifact/SOA composite. The versioned jars can also be uploaded to an artifact repository (such as nexus), in addition to being deployed to MDS runtime, so you have good level of traceability of MDS changes
PS -
This might help explain more: http://weblog.singhpora.com/2016/10/managing-shared-metadata-mds-in-ci.html

How to share jar within multiple portlets?

I'm using several jars in my portlets, for instance c3p0. Now I want to avoid to put the jars in every of my portlets lib folders. How can I share one jar file within multiple portlets? And how should I integrate them in the Eclipse IDE? Add an external jar or put them in one dedicated project and include them from there?
Another solution would be to put them under ../liferay-portal-<version>/tomcat-<version>/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib
If you place them here you can add the JAR as a dependency for your portlet in the portlets liferay-plugin-package.properties (if you're using Liferay Developer Studio or Liferay IDE then there's a nice GUI for this).
Then on deployment Liferay will copy the required JARS from ROOT/WEB-INF/lib to your portlets WEB-INF/lib
This I believe is the Liferay support mechanism for doing it, and doesn't require a restart because the JARs are copied to the portlets classpath on deployment.
One way I can think off is to put all of them in the global path.
For e.g. in Tomcat you could place them at ../liferay-portal-<version>/tomcat-<version>/lib/ext and then when you configure the server-runtime library in eclipse you will have these jars in your build-path.
This link may also help you decide, but it speaks for *-service.jar but I am not sure it would work other jars in any one portlet.

Received a main jar file with other jar files that need to be in the classpath. Whats the best way to include this main jar in my maven project?

So i received a java api from a client and the main code is in main.jar. But the instructions he gave me require me to add these other jars (a.jar, b.jar, etc..) into the classpath whenever I want to use main.jar. These other supporting jars are things like Xerces, jakarta-oro, and a few other publicly available libraries. The problem is i don't know what versions they are, so i'm not sure if there would be issues if i just update the pom.xml file in my app to depend on main.jar and also have dependencies to these other jars as well with the latest versions of them.
Whats the best strategy for using main.jar in my maven application? I'm planning on adding main.jar to our internal maven repository, but what should i do about the xerces, jakarta-oro, and other jars when i dont know what versions they are?
Thanks
If you are lucky the file /META-INF/MANIFEST.MF inside a.jar, b.jar etc. contains an entry "Implementation-Version" or some other useful information which tell you what version they are. If not, you can download the latest release(s) from the project web site and check if they have the same file size as your bundled dependencies.
You may also come to the idea to bundle the dependencies with the main.jar in one big jar, but this may become funny, when you have the dependencies twice in your classpath at some point in the future...
What about just asking the client what version numbers this dependencies have?
If you don't have any information about these third-party libraries, just add them to src/resources/META-INF/lib and commit to SVN. That's the best way, if we're talking about black box approach.

"Make" system for Actionscript?

In working on larger Actionscript/Flash projects, I've started to really feel the need for some kind of "make" system, but I haven't found it yet. Does anyone know if it exists?
Required features:
Ability to associate SWCs with their source code and/or FLAs i.e. "this swc is compiled from this source"
Ability to mark my current project as depending on these SWCs (either as compile-time or runtime libraries)
A single, big shiny button, that when pressed does the following:
Checks to see if any of the source files have changed, and if so, recompiles their associated SWCs
Recompiles and relinks the main .swf, if necessary
Runs the main .swf
Have yet to find a way to get something like FlashDevelop to do this (but I don't know it well enough to be sure). Support for both code and FLA sources is preferred.
You are looking for http://projectsprouts.org/ which is based on Rake the Ruby version of Make. It can do all of that stuff and much more.
If you have Ruby and RubiGems installed which I think are installed by default on Macs you can install it by typing this into your command line.
sudo gem install Sprout
It will take a while because it installs many things. After this is all set you can create a project like this.
sprout -n as3 ProjectName
and then build it with this,
rake deploy
It manges things based on the runtime they are created for, this project was created for as3 but all of the other types of projects also. The build scripts are all writen in Ruby and can be modified to involve more complex multi-step compiles pretty simply. It also has a bunch of generators so that classes automaticly have unit test that are associated with them and many other features.
Might be a stupid suggestion, but if you want make, why not just use "make"? You can use it for any language by defining the right rules.
Apart from that, I've seen a lot of Flex/Actionscript projects use Apache ant, an XML based build system.
As said by wump; why not use Make?
There are some ANT scripts included in the Flex SDK, so you could explore and expand those. I've also spoken to people who use Maven and Cruise Control for automated build process.
Here is some info on Maven Flex: http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/
And some info on Cruise Control w/ Flex: http://www.eyefodder.com/blog/2006/05/continuous_integration_with_fl_5.shtml
Well, there are several options. One I would recommend is the Maven plugin for Flex flex-mojos, now maintained on the Sonotype site. If Maven isn't your cup of tea, they do have an Ant plugin, I don't know if NAnt can call Java Ant tasks directly or not. The third is the most complicated, but Adobe does include an OEM version of the compiler, I believe it comes by default with the SDK download. This is the one I used in the Maven plugin I developed for my company. The reason we didn't use the flex-mojos one basically boils down to a...disagreement about the "Maven way" of one project = one artifact. Their interpretation is that 1 SWF file is one artifact, so is one Maven project. My definition for my project is that all 80+ modules, each a SWF file, are no different than JSPs, all bundled in the same WAR file. So I've got one project with a LOT of modules and 1 maven pom.
You could check out Antpile which according to said link "is a collection of Ant Scripts which cover everything from building a SWF, SWC, AIR, Android and even Unit Testing."

Using Maven to setup a Drupal PHP project

What do I want to achieve?
We are currently working on a PHP project that uses Drupal.
I desperately want to learn how to create a One-step build for the whole project.
Preferably by using something new (for me) that seems very powerful: Maven
Basically I want to automate the following process:
Checkout Drupal from the official CVS repository.
Checkout official 3rd party modules from their respective CVS repositories.
Checkout our custom modules from our mercurial repository.
Copy/move all the modules to the appropriate directory within Drupal.
Checkout and install our custom theme.
Add a custom drupal installation profile.
Create a new MySQL database schema.
If possible, automate the drupal db connection setup.
In the future I would like to run this build on a Hudson (or any other) continues integration server.
Why Maven? (why not Ant or Phing?)
Other than the desire to learn something new (I have used Ant before) I think the dependency management of Maven might work well for the drupal modules.
Do you think this is enough reason to use Maven, even though Maven was not originally intended for PHP projects? I know Ant was not originally used for PHP either, but there are far more examples of people using Ant and PHP together.
BTW I think I will switch to Ant if I can't get Maven to work soon. The procedural style of Ant is just easier for me to understand.
What do I have so far?
I have a pom.xml file, that uses the SCM plugin, to checkout the drupal source.
When I run:
mvn scm:checkout
the source is checked out into a new directory:
target/checkout
When I try:
mvn scm:bootstrap
it complains about the install goal not being defined.
Here is the pom.xml:
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.example</groupId>
<artifactId>drupal</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-scm-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.1</version>
<configuration>
<username>anonymous</username>
<password>anonymous</password>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
<scm>
<connection>scm:cvs:pserver:cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal:drupal</connection>
<developerConnection>scm:cvs:pserver:cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal:drupal</developerConnection>
<tag>DRUPAL-6-12</tag>
<url>http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/?pathrev=DRUPAL-6</url>
</scm>
</project>
Finally, what are my questions?
Is Maven the wrong tool for this?
If no,
How would you do this?
Is it the scm:bootstrap goal that I should be using?
What is the Maven way of moving directories around on the file system?
Should the install goal be used to move the modules into the drupal directory?
Currently all our custom modules are in one mercurial repository. Is it possible to create a pom.xml and checkout each module individually?
Any general advice would be appreciated.
Thanks for your time!
I'm 98% certain that what you really need is Drush Make, which can recursively build Drupal projects, provided they provide their own .make file listing their dependencies. It can download from multiple SCMs, web, patch files, and you can control where they get downloaded. It also support external libs, such as wysiwyg, PHP files, or JS libraries.
See the Open Atrium make file for a sample of what it can do.
Definitely you're not using Maven, here some thoughts:
Maven is a Java build tool and dependency management software with a well-defined lifecycle which goes like this: validate, compile, test, package, integration-test, verify, install, deploy. What you are using is the scm plugin which can stick to any of the phases defined here and perform some actions but unless you make complicated changes in the POM (I haven't heard of anyone doing this) the lifecycle will continue being executed.
Maven also is designed to package JARs, WARs and with the use of some plugins EARs, SARs, RARs (not that RARs) and some other files; you might have to program a new plugin to get the type of packages you expect or use the assembly plugin which will make things more complicated.
Because of the previous points, there is no command for Maven to move the files into an specific directory (not a native one) and you shouldn't invoke install phase to copy the files to any other location than the local repository. What you're doing is like taking a laundry machine and converting it into a blender.
After reading what you want to do with your project I'd suggest you to create a script (shell script or batch script depending on your OS) for doing the job. SVN and CVS has command line tools which can be invoked from inside your build scripts. I guess you opted for Maven, among other reasons, because Hudson and many other Continuous Integration software are well integrated with it but you can use them with scripts too.
If you are comfortable using Ant and you consider using it will ease the building time of your app I think is not as bad ;) (I haven't used Ant for other purposes than Java projects)
The Drush 'module' is a great tool for scripting out things in Drupal. But, beyond that, I think your approach of doing CVS checkouts for each 'build' is a little off base - unless you have -really- good reasons to have every chunk of the project in a separate repository, your best bet is to have fixed checkouts of Drupal core & contributed modules committed to your project's repository. Not only does this take out a dependency on a network connection and the stability of an external server but it allows you to have local modifications of the contributed modules (unfortunately, you're probably going to end up doing this somewhere down the line).
Once you take out the requirement to do checkouts from multiple repositories, you'll probably notice that your task becomes -much- easier, leaving you with some simple MySQL manipulation and writing out a settings.php.
The project http://www.php-maven.org know comes with a build plugin enabling the php world to maven (or the maven world for php projects). Version 2 snapshot can be found in our google groups (news thread available at https://groups.google.com/group/maven-for-php/t/e055e49c89ccb8c5?hl=de).
However this gives you a full control over the project and respects the default maven lifecycle so that the maven commands:
mvn clean
mvn package
mvn deploy
mvn site
will work correctly.
Drupal support may be enabled in version 2.1 where we are focused on frameworks (zend, flow3...) and project types (web, cli, libs...). It would be to much to clearify wha maven is and how it can help you during php development. As Vistor Hugo stated on his early comment Mavens benefits are not only to execute a specific command manually but to embed the whole project structure and the whole project lifecycle via maven.
Since the most php guys did not yet have contact to java and especially maven we are creating tutorials so that everyone has a fairly simple entry in the maven world.
I love maven, although I think it is very java specific as mentioned above.
I had success to handle repeable task with phing. I used in a Zend project to prepare a build or just fasten the normal repetable tasks (eg. clean up db, load db dump).
Phing won't provide you complete lifecycle management as maven, but you can write yourself by hand. You can embed shell script commands to build.xml so you can use everything that you would use in a normal shell script.
I prefer phing over normal shell script because it can handle dependent targets, so if your build.xml contains well designed targets that depend each other, you'll get very useful chains to achive specified goals.
It works for me.
Another great tool for drupal is drush which makes drupal administration scriptable. You can do lots of drupal specific things from console. I think you can call drush commands from phing scripts.

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