Hi, From our perspective, we managed to get things working somewhat adequately as follows:
1. use maven for automated builds and awesome dependency management 2. use eclipse and maven eclipse plugin 3. use gwt and gae plugins (where SDK must point to the same versions as those declared in pom.xml) Our biggest challenge was the assumption that the war lives in a directory named "war". We got around this on *ix by using a symbolic link to point to the actual build directory in "target". The second issue was with the run configurations loading the hosted mode from a non-sdk directory due to the order JAR files are included. We got around this using the -Dappengine.sdk.root parameter. So for us the big wins: 1. better integration of gwt and gae SDKs with maven dependency management 2. flexibility to override all the parameters passed to the HostedMode launcher (in this case we could override "-war") cowper On Jan 13, 8:35 am, Keith Platfoot <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
