What is the best Maven2 plugin for IntelliJ? There are a lot of them now, and I don't have the time to play with them all. It would be very helpful to get opinions and a feature synopsis on existing plugins.
Here is what I am looking for: a) it keeps my paths and repositories synched to change in the pom file; and b) it doesn't keep hiding the target folder.
Also, I've found that an increasing number of archetypes are not parsable with my current setup. Is there a plugin that provides better compatability?
Just the default maven plugin available in the basic intelliJ installation.
Resources :
jetbrains.com - Ant and Maven
Related
I have been looking into Gradle and looks pretty interesting. I think being able to write your scripts in any other language than XML is pretty cool, and it is not clear to me whether polyglot Maven POM files are still a feasible option.
I am working on a project that uses Maven 2.2.1 as build tool. This project:
is multi-module
uses (also our own) plugins
relies on an Artifactory proxy repository
Are there any experiences out there on migrations from Maven to Gradle? Gotchas, pain points, corner cases? Any sort of experience is very welcome.
The migration from Maven to Gradle isn't as easy as from Ant to Maven (at the least at the moment). You can easily reuse Ant scripts and make them first class citizens in your Gradle build. There's a task on the Gradle roadmap for deep import of Maven builds as well.
So far I migrated two enterprise Maven builds to Gradle. Both of them were multi-module projects using standard Maven plugins. I basically rewrote the builds the Gradle way which requires at least some knowledge about Gradle. Based on my experience you can easily get the same build running in Gradle as well. Gradle doesn't really box you in here and is fairly flexible. Along the way you might find yourself having to write a custom plugin that doesn't exist yet depending on what Maven plugins you are using. However, there's already a wide breath of plugins out there. So far I haven't run into a real roadblock yet. Even though the Gradle documentation is pretty good you might find yourself reading a lot of Gradle forum posts to find the solution to one of your problems. Some of the standard Maven features are not supported out-of-the-box e.g. a provided scope or WAR inplace. However, there're easy ways around it. I haven't used Artifactory repositories. The ones I dealt with were Nexus repositories. As far as I know the Gradle guys have good support for Artifactory though. Edit: JFrog provides a Artifactory Gradle plugin.
A good way to start is to use the migration tool Maven2Gradle which let's you generate a Gradle script from your Maven build. Personally, I didn't use it yet. I developed the Gradle build side-by-side with the Maven build which didn't cause any trouble. Maven put its
output under target, Gradle under build. Make sure you prepare your team for the change. Let them try out the Gradle build and get familiar with the tool.
Once you are fully migrated you'll be very happy about the maintainability and extensibility of your build. It's very easy to add custom build logic and you're going to be grateful that you left XML-land. In terms of performance you are not going to make a step back as well. The incremental build feature does its job very well.
You may also want to read through this write-up of my experience porting a maven project to gradle.
In the directory where you have pom.xml just run the below command:
gradle init --type pom
This should convert your maven pom.xml to build.gradle
You can always change the buildDir to be 'target' under gradle if you want the build output to go under 'target' instead of 'build' like maven:
buildDir = 'target'
maven2Gradle seems to have been replaced with being able to run gradle init from the command line (though it's a rather experimental feature). It seems to work ok for doing some basic Gradle setup from a Maven project.
In general, how well does m2eclipse deal with Maven plugins that modify or amend lifecycle phases?
In particular, I have a project that has a maven-clean-plugin extension to remove an extra generated directory (not in target/) using the configuration filesets tag. This works when running mvn at the command line but not when doing a clean in Eclipse. Is there any way to get m2eclipse to process that plugin?
Another example is flexmojos; there's a lot that can be configured with the flexmojo plugin but those parameters don't seem to get imported by m2eclipse.
Is the integration solely ad-hoc? If m2eclipse embeds Maven, why can't the plugins be executed directly using the underlying pom.xml configuration?
In general, how well does m2eclipse deal with Maven plugins that modify or amend lifecycle phases?
Decently, to my experience. At least for plugin bound to phases from the default lifecycle.
In particular, I have a project that has a maven-clean-plugin extension (...). This works when running mvn at the command line but not when doing a clean in Eclipse. Is there any way to get m2eclipse to process that plugin?
What the clean plugin "extension" is doing and what you're doing (calling mvn clean from Eclipse? calling Project > Clean?) is unclear - at least for me. But maybe have a look at MNGECLIPSE-823 or MNGECLIPSE-156. And don't hesitate to clarify :)
Another example is flexmojos; there's a lot that can be configured with the flexmojo plugin but those parameters don't seem to get imported by m2eclipse.
I don't do flex so the above is too vague for me. But providing a more concrete example might help.
I want to start using maven in code I distribute but I can't find an efficient way to work with dependencies. Every new dependency takes me far too long to add.
As a simple example, I need to add Tomcat for compilation. Do I really have to manually trawl the repo in my browser to find the group-id, artifact-id and version number?
In every case it seems easier to find the non-maven downloads. I hope I've missed something obvious.
Do I really have to manually trawl the repo in my browser to find the group-id, artifact-id and version number?
No. Use a repository search engine. Some are mentioned here, more here. Some IDE also offer facilities to search and add dependencies (e.g. Eclipse with m2eclipse).
First of all, using some IDE really helps. Eclipse has m2eclipse plugin and if you define locations of remote maven repositories in your pom definition, you can add dependencies in its pom editor and it will automatically search the proper artifacts for you.
What is really helpful is using repository manager like Nexus / Artifactory, where you gather the most important maven repositories and then you don't need to declare particular repository locations in your pom definition for various artifacts, but everything will be proxied via Nexus.
The past week or two I've been studying Maven, and I like it, but there are just a few things that I require Ant tasks for, rather than Maven's complicated and scarcely-documented POM file. However, I believe Maven has a great folder structure going for it, and I like that it natively supports tests, packages the project into a jar by default, and supports a 'resources' folder, from which everything is directly copied into the jar file.
Is there a sample Ant project out there that does the same sort of thing but with an Ant build.xml script? I want the placeholder folders and hello world app and test, just like Maven does when you first create a project from its default archetype:create goal (as demonstrated in the Maven in 5 Minutes page). Or, is there an even better Ant sample project out there that does more or suggests a better folder layout?
If no such thing exists, perhaps someone can help create it in a nice detailed answer? I would be willing to host a permanently-available zip file for anyone who finds this question in the future.
mvn archetype:create
mvn ant:ant
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-ant-plugin/usage.html
... but if there are really "just a few things", you may want to check out the AntRun plugin instead. I'm not trying to sell you on Maven, believe me, but since it's not clear exactly what is stopping you from trying it with your project, I guess I'm suggesting you try to push the issue a little harder.
Refer this: Why you should use the Maven Ant Tasks instead of Maven or Ivy
I also wouldn't recommend Ivy, reasons at the link above.
Quoting the Maven - Frequently Asked Technical Questions and more precisely:
How can I use Maven features in an Ant build?
The Maven Ant Tasks allow many of the
features of Maven, such as dependency
management and repository deployment,
to be used in an Ant build.
Refer to the installation page and the usage page for instructions for installing and using the Maven Ant Tasks respectively. You'll find many links to samples in the usage page and a build.xml showing most of the features in action.
An alternative (direct competitor?) to Maven Ant Tasks would be Apache Ivy.
PS: While it's definitely a good idea to adopt maven standards, even partially, I'd really think about it twice before to drop Maven (but I live in the Maven jungle for a while now - and I like it - so I'm biased).
I have a maven pom file which depends on this plugin, but I can't find it anywhere online. Is this something which needs to be built from some other piece of code?
I searched in Sonatype repository and svn but I also didn't find jar nor sources. Customizable build lifecycle mappings is a experimental feature in m2eclipse. So if you don't need this feature you can comment this plugin.
Edit
After some tests I've noticed that if you use Maven 3.0 Embedded runtime your pom will work without complain, but there is still no jar for this plugin in the repository. So there is some kind of magic or I need to read more about Maven3/Embedded :)
alt text http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/7041/m2eclipse.png