Hi Pierce,
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Pierce T. Wetter III
<pierc..winforces.com> wrote:
>
> I'm a big picture guy, so worrying about what folders should be named is
> way too much a detail to bother me.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about that. I'm talking about more than
the standard directory layout. Maven enforce some "best practices". If
you don't like one of its "best practices" you will probably start
criticizing Maven because it is difficult or impossible to do in a
different way. It is not lack of flexibility. It is a proposed way to
develop software.
For example, if one of your tests don't pass, the build fails. If you
want to add a dependency to your project, you must use a repository
(you can't add the jar to your project and write some configuration
into your pom.xml). You can't release a project if it has a SNAPSHOT
(under development) version of a dependency. These kind of
"restriction" seems like a huge problem for some people.
The examples have not do with the standard directory layout.
>
> So with maven, if I buy into the philosophy that inside each project, all
> of my files should be laid out with a certain structure, and it should be
> the same for all projects, and it should be the same for all WO developers
> everywhere, my life will be easier.
Yes. This is a good start. :)
>
> Now in addition to all that, Java has this whole issue with classpaths that
> sucks. Eclipse hides a lot of the pain and suffering from you, but once you
> do a deployment, surprise, you're missing foo.jar! So maven has some kind of
> magic for dealing with this as well, something I don't understand yet.
Dependency Management + Repository Managers = Magic. You can also
achieve this kind of magic using Ant+Ivy [1] as mentioned by Chuck.
> But it might solve that annoying problem, hallelujah. But its not clear to me if
> I can setup the dependencies in a GUI with Eclipse or if I have to edit the
> pom.xml.
Not often. There is no 1.0 plug-in for Maven integration with Eclipse.
So, you can suspect that some features are missing. Both plug-ins
(m2eclipse [2] and q4e [3]) have wizards to add dependencies to your
project. But it doesn't work every time. There is no visual editor for
the pom.xml. But the Eclipse XML Tools can help with the autocomplete
feature.
You can also use mvnrepository [4] to search for dependencies deployed
on Central Maven Repository.
>
> So...lets say I want to buy into maven. Lets say I want to do the absolute
> minimum amount of pom.xml hacking (though GUI editing in eclipse is ok). Are
> those steps documented anywhere?
The current Maven documentation to develop WebObjects applications was
referenced in my first e-mail. I think everybody will be happy if you
start using Maven and help us to write more documentation.
> So its seems like I'm half right. WOLips & Wonder are migrating to FBL. The
> maven plugins have their own layout, and in Wonder use pom.xml instructions
> so that maven groks FBL. Presumably, I could look at the Wonder sources
> (when maven builds are working again) and come up with an fbl.xml that I
> could use in all my project pom.xml files. If I did that, I could migrate to
> maven with a minimum of fuss.
Not so easy. Lachlan have described his problems while starting to use
Maven on "WebObjects Nightly Builds and WOLips addition" thread
(referenced by Andrus). Besides, as WOLips and Wonder was not
developed with Jar dependencies in mind, you may find some
bugs/restrictions. Lachlan have already fixed some of them.
[1]http://ant.apache.org/ivy/
[2]http://m2eclipse.codehaus.org/
[3]http://code.google.com/p/q4e/
[4]http://www.mvnrepository.com/
Cheers,
Henrique
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