Monday, December 19, 2005

Maven 2 - How To: Where to put the properties?

1) The properties, in Maven 1 in build.properties and project.properties, are stored in settings.xml

2) Create the settings.xml in your user directory

Under Windows XP, this is:

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\.m2\settings.xml

If you have to configure a proxy, it would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<settings>
<proxies>
<proxy>
<active/>
<protocol>http</protocol>
<username>user</username>
<password>passwd</password>
<port>8080</port>
<host>proxy-url</host>
<id/>
</proxy>
</proxies>
</settings>

3) Since settings.xml is not part of your workspace and won't be stored in the project repository, you don't have it within your development environment. I'm using Eclipse for my development and I included the settings.xml in my project as a linked resource to the file system.

This approach gives you the advantage, that you can edit settings.xml easily within Eclipse and you don't have to leave your development environment :)

* * *

Reference:

http://maven.apache.org/maven-settings/settings.html

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Maven 2 - How To: Multiple Module (flat project layout)

1) Create at least two Maven projects in a flat project layout...

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_MASTER%pom.xml
...

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_SLAVE%pom.xml
...

2) Define the <groupId> and <artifactId> of the modules...

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_MASTER%\pom.xml:

<project>
...
<groupId>somegroup.master</groupId>
<artifactId>master</artifactId>
...
</project>

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_SLAVE%\pom.xml:

<project>
...
<groupId>somegroup.slave</groupId>
<artifactId>slave</artifactId>
...
</project>

3) Define the modules in the master project...

Here I added first the artifactId, but it didn't work. I changed it to the directory and everything was fine.

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_MASTER%\pom.xml:

<project>
...
<modules>
<module>../%YOUR_PROJECT_SLAVE%</module>
</modules>
...
</project>

4) Add the <parent> and <dependency> element in the slave module...

%PROJECT_WORKSPACE%\%YOUR_PROJECT_SLAVE%\pom.xml:

<project>
...
<parent>
<groupId>somegroup.master</groupId>
<artifactId>master</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>
...
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>somegroup.master</groupId>
<artifactId>master</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
...
</dependencies>
...
</project>

5) Call mvn install...

First the master project will be called and than slaven... That's it :)

* * *

References:

- http://maven.apache.org/
- http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html
- http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ide-eclipse.html

Maven 2 - How To: Add LICENSE.txt

1) Add LICENSE.txt to the root directory of your project...

%YOUR_PROJECT% pom.xml
LICENSE.txt
src site ...

2) Copy your license into LICENSE.txt

3) Include the <licenses> element in the pom.xml...

%YOUR_PROJECT%\pom.xml:

<project>
...
<licenses>
<license>
<name>The Apache Software License, Version 2.0</name>
<url>LICENSE.txt</url>
</license>
</licenses>
</project>

4) Inculde project ${reports} in site.xml

%YOUR_PROJECT%\src\site\site.xml:

<project>
...
${reports}
</body>
</project>

Maven 2 - Collection of How-To's

I'm currently migrating two projects to Maven 2 (http://maven.apache.org/) and decided that I'll document this within my blog.

Although the Maven documentation has grown a lot, I'm still having difficulties to find the right piece of documentation to get my things done. Often I have to check the Maven repository to see how the Maven guys did it. By the way - I think this is a great advantage of open source ;) I hope and I'm quite sure, that this will improve a lot within the next few weeks and months.

Since I forget very fast ;) (very-very short time memory), I'll write down a collection of How-To's, where I describe little tasks. Maybe this will be helpful for other people too...

Working Offline

Currently I'm spending many hours working offline and this wasn't very easy when I started doing it. I was used to have internet access 24x7. Since I'm in Thailand (see http://tomionthai.blogspot.com/) now and I don't have an internet access at the place I'm staying, I had to find a new way of working.

My first approach was saving the websites with Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/) for offline reading and Google Desktop Search (http://desktop.google.com/) for indexing all the pages. After a while I switched from Firefox to HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) for downloading the pages, since it allows the download of a complete website with all the links and referenced pages. This approach was ok, but had its disadvantages like:

1) I had to come up with my own directory structure to save all the websites.
2) Using Firefox wasn't very comfortable since it tries to save the file with the URL file name. This is very unpleasant if you have a site providing dynamic content and it's using post - every URL looks exactly the same and you will have to rename each file you would like to save locally.
3) Some websites can't be downloaded with HTTrack (or at least I didn't find the right configuration). I spent hours to find the right configuration for downloading Maven (http://maven.apache.org/), but I wasn't very successful.
4) It took quite some time to start and configure HTTrack everytime I wanted to have a certain page for offline reading.
5) Often I downloaded much more than I wanted with HTTrack, which resultat in very long download times and waste of diskspace.

But the biggest drawback was, that this approach saved a lot of garbage on my laptop, which I dind't wanted. Most of the pages show headers, footers, menus and a lot of advertisement. By using Firefox or HTTrack all of this was downloaded as well and resultet in bad search results in Google Desktop Search, this because menus referenced to other pages with the actual content and this menu links contained my search key words, of course Google Desktop Search listed them too.

Finally I found a much nicer and even easier approach. My dream team is called PDFCreater (http://pdfcreator.sourceforge.net/, http:www.pdfcreator.de.vu/) and Google Desktop Search. Everytime I see a page, an article or some content I would like to read offline, I print it with PDFCreator and save the pdf file on my disk. First of all, many pages offer a printer-friendly version of the content which results in a nice print and in this case in a nice pdf file. I don't have to create complex directory structures anymore, I just created a simple structure with meta descriptions and I save all the pages/pdfs in these directories. Google Desktop Search has no problem indexing the pdf files and it's also nicer to read them in Acrobat Reader (http://www.adobe.com/) than in Firefox. The final advantage for me is, that I can easily backup all the files and I use them as my knowledgebase.

If you have to work a lot offline, but you still would like to read current articles from the internet, you might want to try this approach. If you have a better approach, I'm very interested in knowing it... thanks in advance :)

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Java XML Binding

I'm working right now on CreateTree, a simple tool for reading and
creating directory and file structures, CreateTree is a part of the BDT
project (http://bdt.sf.net/).

The model is defined in a XML Schema and finally transformed with Apache
XML Beans into a Java model.

Before I decided to use Apache XML Beans, I had a look at
https://bindmark.dev.java.net/, a project which compares Java XML
Binding tools.

Since I don't have much experience with bind tools, Bindmark is very
helpful and provides a lot of information.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

New Eclipse help plugin for eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net available

New Eclipse help plugin for the tutorials at eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net available

I developed a new Eclipse help plugin, containing all the tutorials from eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net. With the new plugin, you can select the tutorials you would like to see and you don't have to download all of it at once.

This will help us to deliver new tutorials easier for the help plugin.

You can find the Eclipse help plugin under:


Enjoy :)