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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T18:15:54+00:00

I’m converting an Ant based project to be buildable by Maven. Standard build is

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I’m converting an Ant based project to be buildable by Maven. Standard build is working for now. I’m trying to migrate the additional build targets which are specified in the original Ant build descriptor. Our project can be deployed as a desktop application or as a Web Start launchable client. You can invoke the original Ant file naturally with dist, which simply builds the project but doesn’t do post processing for web start, and also there’s a dedicated target for JWS which calls dist, then do jar signing and rearranging the distribution files to be be easily deployable to the web server.

I’ve found out that Maven has a Jarsigner plugin for doing code signing. My project currently builds the core jar, copies all artifact dependencies to target, creates the correct manifest file for the core jar, and also unpacks the configuration artifact to target/ (this contains various things, like XMLs and property files). However i don’t know how to fit into the Maven descriptor the following additional steps:

  • Sign all jar files (also external dependencies), removing existing signatures as well.
  • Rearrange the resulting jar files to a different directory layout. I also need to edit XML files for this configuration and pack them to a configuration jar which needs to get signed also.

After modification the project have to be buildable the standard way. So Web Start build have to be optional. I should note that we are using NetBeans to build/debug/profile the application.

I’m a little bit lost how to achive these with Maven. Could someone please give some suggestion how should i move forward?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve solved my problem this way:

    • I’ve created a new jar module for the web start client configuration. During build Maven unpacks only those parts of the original config artifact to the build directory which are required for Web Start (you can specify filter rules for the dependency-unpack plugin). Then i’m using the Maven XML plugin to modify XML files using XSLT templates. Finally Maven takes care of packaging all these to a web start client configuration artifact.

    • I’ve also created a pom only module for the actual web start client building. This project has no classical artifact output so only the POM gets installed to the artifact repository. This module has dependencies for the source code (excluding original configuration) and for the web start client artifact. I’m using the dependency copying capability of Maven to arrange jar files in the correct structure in target directory. Finally i’m using the Maven jarsigner to sign all jars.

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