I was think about about how well maven manages project dependencies and I suddenly though, could I use it to distribute an application to client PCs?
Every client PC would have to have maven installed and configured to use the company repository. On a shared PC I would install a the application's POM and a batch file Uses would simply run the batch file, which would run a maven command that would download the required jars from the company repository and start up the application. Of course I would need a plugin to start up the application and I thought exec-maven-plugin would do the trick. Turns out you need to have the entire project checked out into the directory, the pom itself is not enough. I know that I should be using Webstart, but even with the webstart-maven-plugin, sometimes webstart is a pain. This is for a company wide application so we don't need to worry about firewalls, security, etc. Is the idea totally crazy? Is there a better (simpler) wayt of distributing applications? Regards Richard