Maven-ing your way around DataCleaner

There seems to be quite some frustrations for old ANT-users switching to use Maven so I thought I would make a small post about the main differences and various hacks that are useful to know as a Maven user. The good thing about ANT is that you can always hack your way around a problem and it's quite easy to find the problems that are stopping you. The bad thing is of course that the build-files seem to grow enormously and that you have to enforce your project infrastructure with some kind of common JAR-download area like a FTP or something similar. In contrast Maven focuses not on the build as a process, but more on the content of the build, because in 99% of the times the process of building a java project is pretty much the same, so why not omit the "how" completely and only focus on the "what" of your build? This "what" is configured in the pom.xml file!

Admitted, that was not my primary reason for choosing Maven! :) The thing that won me over was of course the dependency handling system which I really love and loathe a bit at the same time. What you need to be aware of about the dependencies is this:

• Maven automagically creates a local repository for all the JARs you use in your projects.


• There's also a central repository where maven will download the JARs from, if they are not found in the local one.


• If you are working offline or behind a proxy and you need a new JAR you're bound to mess this up :( When Maven can't find it's JARs in the central repository or locally it will blacklist it!


• You can however delete the blacklisting by removing (part of) the local repository, it is found in ~/.m2/repository...
  
  windows: C:/Documents and Settings/[username]/.m2/repository
  
  or linux: /home/[username]/.m2/repository).

OK, so that was the background-knowledge you had to know - now for some of the build goals. The mostly used maven goal is "install", oftenly prefixed with "clean", like this:

mvn clean install

The install goal will build the project, run the unittests, verify that everything worked and then install the resulting JAR/WAR/Whatever into your local repository. This means that you can then use the project as a dependency to another project, smart eh?
And now for some other commonly goals:

mvn site

Create a nifty project site with all sorts of nice information and reports (javadoc, unittests, codecoverage etc. depending on your configuration).

mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Ah, the "skip test" parameter. I spent a long time figuring that one out. This is handy if you're working with several projects at the same time and you've (consciously) broken the build and want to keep on using the dependency.

mvn jetty:run

My new DataCleaner-webmonitor favourite. This will bring up a Jetty container with DataCleaner-webmonitor running on localhost. This of course requires a little configuration in pom.xml, I'm sure you can figure it out, just find the plugin-elements that has to do with jetty :)