Dependency management by external tools versus IDE sugar - intellij-idea

I'm using Intellij IDEA IDE. Instead of using it's internal build and dependency management tools I prefer external tools (ant+ivy if it matters). I want IDEA be able somehow catch on the flylibraries that were retrieved by dependency manager, index them and obviously provide ide sugar (code suggesting and so on).
Is there plugin or any other solution?

I don't know about Ivy, but it already works like this with Maven. You should take a look at "IvyIDEA"; its description says.
Detect source/document/jar type ivy artifacts in dependencies and add them as such to the module

Related

intellij hybris class recompile not working

I installed hybris plugin.
Imported project with it.
Have done ant clean all.
Then, if I try to build->recompile class it's not working. Seems like idea doesn't see classes generated by ant.
If I do build->rebuild project and then build->recompile class it's working fine, but it's not convenient at all. I believe there is fix to this, but I couldn't find it.
This is usual error I've got(packages are different for different cases):
this is essentially the expected behaviour. You can't mix "ant" build
and "native IDEA" build. Those are two separate build systems.
This is an explanation of hybris plugin developer (hybris-integration.atlassian.net/browse/IIPS-120)
And he suggests a solution for that:
before you try to import the project you need to do ant clean all (you will not need to use ant afterwards)
import the project using hybris plugin.
Press Build->Recompile project
Then you can create or modify your test run configuration if needed.
Recompile your classes and so on directly in Idea.
Also, he mentioned deal with JRebel here (hybris-integration.atlassian.net/browse/IIPS-47)
we support both compilation modes. Ant targets and idea internal. They
shouldn't be mixed as idea has it's own compilation model/cache. If
you use idea compilation then you can use JRebel or hotswap.
You cant hotswap classes in hybris without the help of a hotswap agent.There is a tool available in the market called JRebel. It is a good commercial tool if one can afford. However, if you are an open-sourcist, there is a promising alternative to JRebel, which is DCEVM (Dynamic Code Evolution Virtual Machine) along with HotswapAgent.
I don't know if this help,
you can start another cmd console, and run
setantenv and ant build to hotswap class in runtime.

Will intellij idea "mvn install" automatically when make the project?

I'd like to know what will Intellij IDEA do with my Maven project when I click "build the project"?
How will Intellij build the project with Maven?
Intellij IDEA will not automatically do a make install when you do a Build Project. In order to do that, proceed as follows:
Under Maven Projects tab (usually on the right hand side), select the goals you want Intellij to run after a Build -> Make Project and then right click and select the trigger (for instance in the above snapshot, the trigger was chosen as 'Execute After Make'. You can choose whatever you wish).
After doing this a Build -> Make Project will run a mvn clean install as well.
IntelliJ's build system refers to the Maven ecosystem for some hints, but at the end of the day it is a separate build system.
In IntellIJ, you have a Project, with many Modules. These are both IntelliJ concepts.
An IntelliJ Module has a responsibility to understand what are its dependencies and libraries. This can be done purely with IntelliJ semantic, or IntelliJ can allow some other build system to declare the dependencies and libraries. That is to say: the IntelliJ Module can be based on a Maven pom.xml or Gradle's build.gradle.
When you click "Make" on an IntelliJ Java Module: IntelliJ will check which libraries your Module asks for, and also resolve the dependencies of your Module to work out which libraries its dependent Modules ask for.
Once the libraries are known: IntelliJ will invoke Javac or the Eclipse Compiler (whichever you've configured as your Java compiler) with all those libraries on the classpath. And it will output a jar, not a Maven artefact.
IntelliJ Make will not run a mvn compile or similar (unless you configure it to explicitly, as per #Ashutosh Jindal's answer.
Why would IntelliJ use its own, separate build system, when you've provided an authoritative definition for how you'd like to build your project? I can imagine various reasons:
Maven generally just outputs an artefact (sources and binary jars, and a pom.xml), whereas IntelliJ needs additional semantic and indexes to provide all its IDE intelligence. It makes sense to perform the indexing process alongside the compile, since: if you do the compile incrementally, you can understand incrementally which indexes are dirtied also.
The IDE benefits from being involved in the compilation process. For example: IntelliJ can do "continue on error" builds using the Eclipse compiler. Additionally, the Eclipse compiler can be used to compile only those files which have changed (IDEs watch you as you code, so they know very well which files are dirtied). I have heard that Maven does incremental compile, but I don't know how its performance compares.
In order to support a variety of build systems (Ant, Maven, Gradle): the easiest engineering choice for IntelliJ is to rely on the minimum possible amount of domain-specific semantic, and use that to inform one IntelliJ-specific build system. This allows them to re-use a large amount of code, and have few domain-specific differences.

OSGI aware IDE at development time

I'm starting development using OSGi but when one of my concerns is about the lack of support at development time, meaning that commonly IDEs (started using Intellij IDEA) don't use OSGi for class discovery but classpath search IDE managed (I'm in search for one that uses OSGi instead).
The main concern here is to prevent classpath issues at execution time by suing the same OSGi mechanisms at development time.
Does any IDE work this way ?
update: added link to blog post with my experience with IDEA
OSGi is a runtime technology, therefore there is no such thing as an OSGi mechanism at build time. Also bear in mind that ultimately all Java code must be compiled by a Java compiler, usually javac. The javac compiler does not use package dependencies like Import-Package, it always uses JARs or directories on the classpath.
Having said that, Bndtools uses package filtering at build time, based on the exported and private packages of the dependencies. This is a special feature of Eclipse and it does not work when you compile outside of the IDE, e.g. with Ant or Maven. However it may still be useful because if you try to use a non-exported package from another bundle you will get a problem marker with a red X in the Eclipse IDE.

wso2esb - project management

I evaluate SOA products of wso2 for few weeks and there are some basic (and crucial to me) features which I cannot find/use or maybe it just does not exist. I want to make sure.
First of all, creating IDE support. As probably most of you know wso2 team delivers Carbon Studio which is quite a nice thing. Unfortunately when it comes to team work so often importing existing projects into IDE I hit a wall because:
1) If I use Distribution Project I'm required to commit .projects files which actually contains nature understand by Carbon Studio. It is acceptable but it is as well bad practice in my opinion.
2) If I use Maven then after import I'm going to loose project nature so plugins are not going to work without preparing .projects.
Am I missing something? I would like get rid of .projects and be able to use IDE on 100%. Is it possible? Can't it be generated or something. Normally plugins are trying to recognize file type and edit it with specified plugin. I understand that most Synapse configs (for example) are all XMLs but that is not a reason for me. Any way, does someone know some kind of solution?
Also Distribution Project cannot be build from command line if known maven repositories cannot deliver some artifact. I can write maven plugin to implicitly build each wanted artifact but it is not something I want to do if maven can do it for me. And I cannot use maven because after import I'll lose IDE features.
To me IDE is useless if I'm required to fix each project before actually importing it. Time is very precious.
The second important and unacceptable feature is importing jars into project when using, for example, generators. Why created project cannot be configured to use dependencies?
Robert
what is the developer studio version you use? From developer studio 2.0.0 there is a feature to import a carbon project. Then you don't need to commit the .project files.
Goto import --> WSO2 --> Existing WSO2 projects into workspace

maven - is it a good / common practice to use it only for dependency mgmt and then let the ant do everything else..?

I am newbie with maven.
Other than its use for managing dependencies, I am finding little use for it.
It was getting so hard to write up a pom.xml, that I generated a ant build.xml from one of maven's tasks (which is a nice handy task...)
I had to tweak the build.xml that was generated by maven. And now all my compiling, testing, etc., is being done with this build.xml..
Is such a combination common? I am thinking of making it permanent in my project.
Other than its use for managing dependencies, I am finding little use for it.
That's because you don't get it :) Dependencies management is only a small part of Maven, Maven has really much more. Quoting Maven: The Definitive Guide:
Maven is a project management tool which encompasses a project object model, a set of standards, a project lifecycle, a dependency management system, and logic for executing plugin goals at defined phases in a lifecycle. When you use Maven, you describe your project using a well-defined project object model, Maven can then apply cross-cutting logic from a set of shared (or custom) plugins.
Maven uses convention over configuration with lots of useful defaults (directory locations, a defined life-cycle, a set of common plugins that know how to build and assemble software), Maven provides a common interface to build project (unlike Ant, you know how to do things like running tests, packaging, etc with every project, no need to open the build script to find out how it's done), Maven implements reuse through maven plugins (build logic is embedded into plugins for DRY purpose, you don't have to repeat yourself over and over, you don't have to copy/paste parts of your build scripts), Maven has a Project Object Model that allows you to describe your project through meta-data (this enables dependency management, remote repositories, reuse of build logic, tool integration, artifacts search...).
So, because Maven provides a lingua franca or shared language for project management, comparing Maven vs. Ant (+ Ivy if you want), Maven vs. Buildr, Maven vs. Gradle is like comparing apples to oranges, the comparison is just irrelevant.
Is such a combination common? I am thinking of making it permanent in my project.
Well, no, that's really not the maven way of doing things. This might seem tempting (because you have the feeling that you regain control because you understand what is happening with Ant) but you are actually repeating yourself again and losing all advantages of Maven. Sure, there is some learning curve with Maven and I'm not saying you'll learn it in one night but once you'll get it, you'll feel the power. I'd thus recommend to keep trying, to ask questions on the mailing list or here on SO, to read the Maven Book, etc. But don't give up.
So you re-did what Maven gives you for free by writing Ant Tasks within a pom.xml?
Besides doing the Dep-Mgmt, Maven will compile the sources, run all test cases and package the whole thing as jar file for you with no extra configuration. That's the default.
It is not common to enrich a pom.xml with Ant clutter. However, some special tasks or legacy Ant tasks are sometimes embedded into the pom.xml lifecycle, but these are exceptions and not the common case.
What exactly is hard when writing a pom.xml?
I wonder, because most of the time you will do this once for a project and not struggle with it all the time. Also, most IDEs have support for creating the minimum pom.xml, which is just a few lines anyway.
I've tried Maven, personally for home projects and professionally at my workplace, and... I hate it. I must admit I don't have a lot of experience, but it doesn't feel good. I get the idea Maven is a less-than-perfect implementation of a good idea. I'll probably get flamed by Maven enthusiasts, but this is my personal opinion.
I think Maven comes into its own in organizations that deal with a network of interrelated projects, like Apache does; where dependencies tend to change a lot and need to be quite explicitly specified to avoid "jar version hell". For isolated projects dependent on a few seldom changing jars, I find it overly intrusive.
To answer your question: I've read forum and blog posts on the Internet of other people doing exactly what you propagate. They use Maven for dependency management and then do their building with Ant. This undermines some of the benefits Maven is supposed to bring, such as the fact that a "normal" build is simpler to specify in Maven than Ant. However, I think you can be encouraged by the fact that you're not the only person with this idea, and it is indeed working for some other people.
I'd like to give you links to quotes, but I came across this stuff in the past few weeks and didn't collect references.
I'm a Maven fan, but it's not without its problems. Some of the issues I remember (and still fight):
Just like Ant, it has a magical syntax that can be hard to understand. If you're familiar with Any you may forget that, but lots of Ant tasks are terribly documented. The same is true for Maven. One of the reasons I eventually switched to Maven, though, is that for many of the mojos (similar to Ant tasks), you don't have to understand how to configure them. You just have to put the various pieces in the right place (which can be as hard as configuring a task...).
The automatic dependency management is amazing!... when it works. When you have to use non-Maven dependencies (like Hadoop) it becomes a problem. You either have to reference them as system scope dependencies, find somebody else who has packaged them, or package them yourself. And you eventually need to setup your own Maven proxy, like Nexus. And that's a whole extra hassle.
Maven is a lot of trouble on non-network or isolated LANs. The automagic is great, as long as you're networked.
It was getting so hard to write up a pom.xml, that I generated a ant build.xml from one of maven's tasks (which is a nice handy task...) I had to tweak the build.xml that was generated by maven. And now all my compiling, testing, etc., is being done with this build.xml..
Well. you can use maven archetype plugin to generate pom :)
Is such a combination common? I am thinking of making it permanent in my project.
JBoss Seam uses Maven internally to handle dependencies and do some targets in Maven. It's a big project that grew up with Ant, and now is difficult to build entire project solely in Maven, but that is going to happen in near future.
If you just need dependency management with Ant, you could give Ivy a try. Maven is a tool for managing the whole lifecycle of the build process.
Personally, I find Maven a nice tool once you get over the learning curve since you can standardize the build process for a lot of projects and there are a lot of great add-ons (particularly for code analysis tools). However, it's very possible that you do enough custom stuff with your build that the Ivy + Ant combo makes more sense.
Honestly, I would love to see a dependency management tool that implemented that part of Maven, specifically as a command line tool. For everything BUT dependency management, I find Maven to be absolutely awful if you're doing anything but exactly what the most general case is. Every time I try to do something that isn't "normal" (system/acceptance tests, etc), I run into a brick wall due to
either horrid documentation,
being told it's "not the maven way" (when it's a task that needs to happen, and "the way" shouldn't be a factor), or
being told to wait for the next version of maven, because maybe it'll be supported then.
I'd love to have a command line tool that can implement the "I need this as a dependency, go get it" functionality of Maven, possibly even using the pom.xml files of various packages. Then I could just use that in a Makefile and happy :)
Simple answer to the question posed: YES <-- click the link for details and reasoning.