Hi Ashley, I would see the advantages of using a Maven-specific plugin rather than an ant-based one as being:
* Reuse of ant targets - not having to specify repeated ant tasks over many POMs (one of the main reasons for the existence of Maven itself) * Tighter integration with the Maven build process - Maven plugins can reuse POM and other plugin configuration themselves, whereas an antrun-based alternative would have to repeatedly configure it's tasks * Minimal configuration required (as a result of the above) * No ant dependencies or ant-based exceptions What problems were you having with the tomcat plugin? I'm using it on a daily basis and have no issues. Admittedly some online documentation would help, but I think the mojo.codehaus.org guys will be setting up deployed sites and binaries soon. Cheers, Mark On 14/09/05, Ashley Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm currently trying to autodeploy my webapp to tomcat at the end of > my m2 install, and as far as I can tell there are two ways of doing > this: > > 1. Use the maven tomcat plugin beta. I tried this and had a devil of > a time trying to get it to work - not familiar with it, immature code > etc > 2. Use the tomcat ant task. I believe there has been talk here about > the maven ant plugin which would enable me to just call the more > mature ant task that I already know. > > So I suppose the question is more general: why would I ever use > custom maven plugins when I can just call the familiar ant equivalent > from within Maven? I'm believe I understand the benefits of the > transitive library dependencies and the built in build lifecycle but > I don't have a clear idea in my mind when it comes to how best to use > and write plugins. > > Thanks > -AW > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
