I know various people have expressed interest in Maven over the years. From a quick search I see such discussions going back to 2003!
OFBiz would definitely benefit from more modularization, and Maven may be able to help with that. However, it is just a tool and would still require significant work in addition to what Eric describes below to clean up higher-level OFBiz artifacts like services and screens and such to make the dependency tree clean. Based on the build-time dependencies Eric has generated an interesting graph that he sent to me, and it turns out to be a pretty good graph of component dependencies (even though technically if everything were written in the way intended by the framework, there wouldn't be so many build-time dependencies like this). The graph is actually better than the old old one I hand-rolled (that is in the Component and Component Set Dependencies document in the OFBADMIN space on Confluence). Getting back to the point, does anyone have an opinion on: 1. better modularizing OFBiz 2. using Maven for build and/or module dependency management? -David On Jul 12, 2011, at 12:09 PM, Eric Bowman wrote: > Hi, > > I've written a tool that we're considering open sourcing, and I'm curious to > gauge how much interest there would be in it. > > The purpose of the tool is to generate proper poms for each of the ofbiz > modules by inspecting an ofbiz directory. It works in two steps, and it uses > the Nexus search API (so it's not that interesting unless you have a Nexus > repository installed somewhere nearby). > > Here's what it does: > > 1. Inspects $OFBIZ_HOME recursively, identifying external dependency libraries > 2. Generates the SHA1 hash of each jar, and uses a Nexus API to determine > whether that jar already exists in Nexus as a known artifact. > 3. If it does not, it takes a random sample of the classes in each jar, and > queries Nexus to see can it figure out a reasonable groupId & artifactId. > 4. For artifacts not already in Nexus, it synthesizes a mvn > deploy:deploy-file for each jar and each possible groupId/artifactId/version > it decides might be useful, and lets you decide which commands to run to get > all the dependency jars in Nexus. > 5. After all the external dependencies are in Nexus, it looks through > $OFBIZ_HOME again, and determines all the transitive dependencies between > ofbiz modules > 6. Next it synthesizes a pom for each module, that captures both the > dependencies in that module's lib directory, as well as the simplest > transitive graph of dependencies on other modules. > 7. Finally it prints out mvn deploy:deploy-file commands which can be run > separately to put each ofbiz module's jar file into Nexus, along with its pom. > > If you are using maven, this is pretty nice -- this way you don't have to > worry about declaring dependencies against all the jars in the ofbiz > directory; it figures all that out, and leverages maven's transitive > dependency resolution to make a clean build. > > Obviously it doesn't solve other problems, like how to deploy an ofbiz server > in a maveny way, but that may follow. > > If you're interested in seeing this open sourced, perhaps you can reply > off-list; if there is enough interest I'll put this on github. And maybe > even if there isn't. :) > > Cheers, > Eric Bowman >
