Hi, I've been writing to the list off and on over the past few days. I'm a ColdFusion developer and I'm looking at Maven for a few different reasons. Mainly, I'm exploring the option of using Groovy+Spring+Hibernate to create the service layers and models for my applications. ColdFusion is simply a JEE app that can compile CFML code to Java bytecode and execute it.
A typicaly ColdFuson developer would treat ColdFusion similar to how a PHP developer might. IE, they'd connect ColdFusion (running in its container) to a web server like Apache and have it compile and run CFML source code. However, because CF is Java we also have the ability to easily instantiate Java classes and work with them. CF is great for presentation work and many OO development tasks, but it's interpreted nature can sometimes cause issues. So there's a bit of a moment to look at Groovy to create a Java-based, compiled model and then using MVC frameworks in ColdFusion for presentation. This also makes a nice way to share an application's model between Flex and HTML UIs. Anyhow, ColdFusion itself can be deployed as a WAR or EAR file. If you do a WAR deployment there's actually both a cfusion.war and rds.war file. Both are needed to get the full range of features of the language and server. If I deployed the ear file both war files are included in it. If I were to deply war files to Jboss, for example, I'd put both war files (epanded) into the /server/default/deploy directory. When working with Maven, I'm not quite sure how to accomplish this. I've found that if I can expand the cfusion.war into the default webapp archetype's src/main/webapp directory and it will "just work". However, I'm not sure where to put the rds.war, or if it's even possible to run more than on war file through maven. How would you do this? My ultimate goal would be to have something like this: A parent project to build everything. A child project for my Groovy/Java code. This gets compiled into a jar and used by my next child project. Another child project which would be a webapp with the cfusion.war and rds.war deployed into it, along with any CFML code and the jar created in the first child project. This would be built into.... well, I'm not 100% sure. :) Probably a war file that would be deployed to a server.... but maybe it would really just be one war which as CF, my jar, and CFML code. The second rds.war would be used essentialy as-is. Anyhow, I'd appreciate your feedback and suggestions. Thanks, Doug Hughes
