Hello, I'm rather new to Maven, but I've been working through the Maven: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition book. I've been fairly successful so far making Java and Groovy projects and adding dependencies. I've even got it working with Eclipse, which for various reasons was rather painful.
I have some questions about how dependencies are handled within Maven. I understand that when you add a dependency that Maven looks at the central repository, finds the correct files and downloads them. I'm wondering if this can only be done for JAR/WAR files? For the record, I'm a ColdFusion/CFML developer. ColdFusion applications are made up of a collection of CFML files. These files are compiled to Java byte code at runtime and executed by the Java server. ColdFusion itself is really just a servlet that handles this process for you. The thing is, there are a number of ColdFusion frameworks that are commonly used. There's a framework similar to Spring called ColdSpring, there's an MVC framework called Model-Glue (which has a dependency on ColdSpring), and there are a few ORM frameworks to choose frome. A framework in CF are really just a directory filled with various CFML files. There isn't a concept like a JAR file in CF. So, if I wanted to use a framework in my application the simplest way to do it is simply copy it into the root of my application. My question then is, is it possible to somehow define a dependency which is a collection of files? Also, if I did somehow define that dependency, is there a way to make sure that the dependency is coppied to a specific directory within he webapp? Or, should I be looking at plugins to accomplish this, or something else entirely? Thanks for your help, Doug Hughes, President Alagad Inc. [email protected] 888 Alagad4 (x300) Office: 919-550-0755 Fax: 888-248-7836
