selenium-central-framework in pom.xml - maven

Question

I am not able to find any hint about the issue that I am facing and hence posting my question here. Please apologize if it is something silly.
I have some working experience in selenium webdriver. However in my new project, I was asked to use an existing Selenium framework.
In the pom.xml, I am seeing the below dependency (I have edited xxx to avoid displaying the company name)
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.xxxqa.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-central-framework</artifactId>
<version>2.0.18</version>
</dependency>
Question :
I couldn't understand from where that dependancy was taken from ?
Solution Tried :
I have tried searching in the maven repository still couldn't find
anything related to "selenium-central-framework"
I have checked the dependencies of selenium RC, but they seems to be different from the one that is present above.
I have researched whether any local jars were used and were linked
as dependancy. However I understand from maven repository, local
repositories will be linked with the tag "systemPath"
<dependency>
<groupId>ldapjdk</groupId>
<artifactId>ldapjdk</artifactId>
<scope>system</scope>
<version>1.0</version>
<systemPath>${basedir}\src\lib\ldapjdk.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Note that the depedency used in my project doesn't have the tag "systemPath".
Is there anyway the external repositories could be added without mentioning systemPath ??
Please help, what could be that dependency ? How to find more information about it. Thanks a ton for your help.

Answer 1

I suggest you one of these approaches:
Jar file
If you have access to the jar file called : selenium-central-framework-2.0.18.jar, open a command line pointing to the folder of this jar and execute:
mvn install:install-file \
-Dfile=selenium-central-framework-2.0.18.jar \
-DgroupId=com.xxxqa.selenium \
-DartifactId=selenium-central-framework \
-Dversion=2.0.18 -Dpackaging=jar
Source code file
If you have the source code of : selenium-central-framework-2.0.18.jar, open a command line pointing to the folder of this source code and execute:
mvn clean install
After one of these approaches, selenium-central-framework-2.0.18.jar will be available in you local maven repository ($HOME/.m2) and your other java maven projects will be ready to use it as dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.xxxqa.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-central-framework</artifactId>
<version>2.0.18</version>
</dependency>
This is a workaround if you don't have a server to host an artifact repository management server like :
https://www.sonatype.com/nexus-repository-sonatype
https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Maven+Repository
Explanation
Almost all free, public, safe, useful and cool java libraries are hosted in https://mvnrepository.com . So any person in the world can use it in their maven project with this piece in their pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
<version>3.141.59</version>
</dependency>
But in some cases, publish your source code to https://mvnrepository.com is not an option:
Oracle Driver. This driver (.jar) can only be downloaded from the official Oracle page. Private source code like IBM, Microsfot,etc
Source code of your company that should not be public.
Some super cool library that is only in github but not in the maven central repository.
So in this cases, the best and scalable solution is host and configure some artifact repository management server like :
https://www.sonatype.com/nexus-repository-sonatype
https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Maven+Repository
This platforms are an emulation of https://mvnrepository.com . So with a minimal configuration:
You can host your special or private jars
Your maven projects could use this jars with the standrad xml dependency in pom.xml.
If you don't have a server to implement one of these platforms, the previous approaches could help you and get the same results