Hi folks, For the next release of the Google Plugin for Eclipse, we're planning on making a few tweaks to make life easier for Maven users. That's right: we've seen the stars on the issue tracker, and have decided it's time to act. I would say, "we feel your pain", but the problem is, we don't. Which is to say, nobody on the plugin team actually uses Maven (everybody around here uses Ant). However, I've been researching Maven to determine exactly what changes we should make to allow it to work more seamlessly with the Google Eclipse Plugin. I've read the relevant issues and groups postings, so I think I have a rough idea of what needs to happen. However, before we go and make any changes, I wanted to ask for the community's advice. So, here are some questions for you.
What is the typical workflow of a GWT developer using Maven? I've installed Maven and the gwt-maven-plugin 1.2-SNAPSHOT and managed to create a GWT 2.0 app with the provided archetype. After some tweaking, I'm able to GWT compile, debug with Eclipse (though not via our Web App launch configuration), create a WAR, etc. However, I'm more interested in how you all are doing things. For example: How do you... - Create a new project? - Perform GWT compiles? - Debug with Eclipse? - Run your tests? - Create a WAR for deployment? What specific pain points do Maven users run into when using the Google plugin? I know one major obstacle is that our plugin currently treats the war directory as both an input (e.g. static resources, WEB-INF/lib, WEB-INF/web.xml) and output (WEB-INF/classes, GWT artifacts like nocache.js and hosted.html) . Maven convention, however, says that /src/main/webapp should be input only, which means that hosted mode (or development mode, in GWT 2.0) needs to run from a staging directory (e.g. gwt:run creates a /war folder on demand). This mismatch results in the plugin creating spurious validation errors and breaks our Web App launch configuration. Another incompatibility is that Maven projects depend on the GWT Jars in the Maven repo, whereas our plugin expects to always find a GWT SDK library on the classpath. Are my descriptions of these pain points accurate? If so, one possible solution would be for the plugin to allow the definition of an input war directory (e.g. src/main/webapp) separate from a launch-time staging directory, and for us to relax the requirement that all GWT projects must have a GWT SDK library. So tell me: would these changes adequately reduce the friction between Maven and the Google plugin? Also, are there other problems Maven users are running into when using the plugin? Thanks in advance for all feedback, Keith, on behalf of the Google Plugin for Eclipse team--
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