Question

We have 2 Maven applications, a war application which contains our jsps and presentation layer code, and a shared library which contains our business layer code.

Before migrating to maven we had the shared library as a project reference of the WAR application. Whenever we built or debugged the WAR application in Netbeans, the shared library would get automatically compiled and built and any new changes were picked up automatically.

With Maven, it looks like any time we make a change to the shared library we now need to build the shared library project BEFORE debugging. Is there any way to retain the efficiency of the old method?

When we debug the WAR application is there any way to have Maven build the shared library dependency (local jar project) automatically whenever we debug?

Answer 1

Ok, I finally accomplished this using the maven invoker plugin:

<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-invoker-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.6</version>
<configuration>
    <projectsDirectory>../</projectsDirectory>
    <pomIncludes>
        <pomInclude>project1/pom.xml</pomInclude>
        <pomInclude>project2/pom.xml</pomInclude>
    </pomIncludes>
    <goals>
        <goal>install</goal>
    </goals>
</configuration>
<executions>
    <execution>
        <id>build-deps</id>
        <goals>
            <goal>install</goal>
        </goals>
    </execution>
</executions>

I highly doubt this is best practice, but it got the job done. You could install this into it’s own profile to make sure it doesn’t interfere with automated building.