Nelz' Blog

Maven is Gettting Pretty Mature

For quite some time, I've been a proponent of Maven. But, I did always have to admit that it was quite a challenge to adopt it. However, I'm starting to think that maybe Maven is reaching a decent maturity level.

I wanted to add JSP precompilation to my teams build of our WAR file. I did a small Google search for "maven jspc" and I got a link directly to the CodeHaus Mojo project, and specifically to the JSPC Plugin.

They suggested the following:

<project>
.
.
.
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                <artifactId>jspc-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>jspc</id>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>compile</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <webXml>${basedir}/target/jspweb.xml</webXml>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
            .
            .
            .

This worked pretty well for me, except that it blew up on some Auto-Boxing, which is a JDK 1.5 feature. The FAQ wasn't very clear, but this is how to fix the JSPC plugin for JDK 1.5:

<project>
.
.
.
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                <artifactId>jspc-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.5</source>
                    <target>1.5</target>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>jspc</id>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>compile</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
            .
            .
            .

This was all well and good, but it added about 30 seconds to every build that my teammates would run. (The JSPC plugin is attached to the process-classes lifecycle phase.) I want to keep the build times down as much as possible, so I decided to add the JSPC plugin under a profile:

<project>
.
.
.
<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>precompile</id>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                <artifactId>jspc-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>jspc</id>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>compile</goal>

                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <webXml>${basedir}/target/jspweb.xml</webXml>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
  </profile>
</profiles>
            .
            .
            .

Now, whenever someone wants to run the JSP precompilation at their workstation, all they have to do is add the -P precompile option to their maven command line. And, for CruiseControl, all I had to do was add activateprofiles="precompile" to the <maven2 .../> schedule element.

YAY for easy!

Posted at 12:08PM Dec 07, 2007 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Ideas  |  Comments[0]