Question

Can I make a single maven project that can be included as a dependency (to reference Java classes inside) and executed as a plugin?

I’m working on a library to help with hosting GWT on a LAMP stack. For someone to use this, they need to extend some Java classes (so it must be a dependency) and they need to invoke a maven plugin (so it needs to be a plugin). The plugin code references the same Java classes, so if they are seperate projects, the plugin one must depend on the library one.

As is, I have the library as a normal maven project, and the plugin as a maven plugin that depends on the library. This means that to do a release, I have to release two different artifacts, and the dependent project must update both version numbers for both artifacts. It’d be nice to have a single project.

Answer 1

You’d be better of by doing the following

1. project for the jar, Foo:Foo.jar
2. project that uses Foo:Foo.jar as a
   dependency that builds the plugin
3. Maven parent project that
   builds 1&2

The directory structure would look like this

\project\pom.xml
\project\foo\pom.xml
\project\foo\src\main\java\foo.java
\project\plugin\pom.xml
\project\plugin\src\main\resources
\project\plugin\src\main\java

From \project you can do a mvn clean package to build \project\foo\target\foo.jar and \project\plugin\target\plugin.jar

Hope this helps.