This is an interesting idea, and there seem to be a number of plugins for
Maven that deal with release/build/deploy automation.
Looking around to learn more about this I found this interesting intro
presentation that talks about the Maven release plugin, plus plugins for
other tools like Codehaus Cargo and LiquiBase (with a nice little intro to
LiquiBase, which is very cool BTW):
http://www.slideshare.net/wakaleo/automated-deployment-with-maven-going-the-whole-nine-yards
-David
On Jul 13, 2011, at 3:39 PM, Eric Bowman wrote:
Yes. We version our changes of ofbiz in a mavenesque way, and intend to
use the maven release plugin to generate releases which get "deployed" (in
maven terminology) to a repository, from which they get deployed to real
servers.
On 13 Jul 2011, at 15:18, David E Jones wrote:
Is part of the intent to use the Maven release plugin for deployment and
such as well?
-David
On Jul 13, 2011, at 3:12 PM, Eric Bowman wrote:
Hi,
One other point: this tool is currently useful against ofbiz "as-is",
in order to build software that depends on it, using maven. Converting
ofbiz to use maven is a considerably bigger project.
On 13 Jul 2011, at 15:01, David E Jones wrote:
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
