Merge i18n properties file in maven overlay plugin - maven

I have two web application projects in place, Project A and Project B. Project B has war dependency on Project A. Both projects have messages.properties files to handle i18n. However, the location of properties is same for both the projects. I am using maven war overlay plugin to overlay files of Project A on to Project B. If files are in the same location for these two projects, maven will not override Project B's files and leave them as is. However, this leads to maintenance problems as new text for i18n has to be added in messages.properties of both the web applications.
Is there a way to tell maven war overlay plugin to merge the properties files at the time of packaging? The logic of not overriding files when already present serves us well otherwise.

You should be able to achieve this with the Maven Cargo plugin outputting an uberwar.
http://cargo.codehaus.org/Merging+WAR+files
It doesn't know how to merge properties files out of the box, but it's super easy to implement a custom merger, all you need to do is implement org.codehaus.cargo.module.merge.MergeProcessor, and have it available on the classpath.
You probably just want to write a simple merger that can concatenate files together, unless you have duplicate properties then you might need to do something a little more fancy.

Related

building a jar library from a war project using maven?

We have a EAR project which has a WAR project. Maven is used, so pom.xml. As typical of any project, this project also contains a big feature (say Job Scheduling "JBS") among many other features. As it is planned to retire this whole project in the near future, it is discouraged heavily to spend much on working on this project (whether bugs or enhancements).
Therefore, for the sake of running the (JBS) feature as a separate application, the whole EAR project was duplicated (also to save time/cost). As a result, all the Java packages and classes (necessary for JBS project) were duplicated. In this situation, if we update one or more classes in the main project, this (JBS) feature project/application gets outdated (and needs update).
The fact is that this JBS feature project ONLY requires many packages of Java classes (from the main EAR-WAR project), and do not require 99% of the web modules and others. I am removing all the unnecessary things from JBS project. Then I would like to create a JAR library with all the java classes, so JBS project can have a dependency on this JAR.
I do not know if it is a good idea to separate these classes out of the main project (to create another Java project). I would like to continue to have these classes as part of the main project. Then, it will be good, as and when one or more of these classes are changed, a new version of the JAR will be generated (right away). And the JBS project would then make use of this updated JAR.
How can we accomplish this? I understand, through maven, we can do a build/package jar/war/ear on a project of that nature. I am not an expert with maven (and did not learn it systematically).
But, is there a way to create one or more JARs additionally from inside WAR pom.xml? In other words: I mean pom.xml of WAR will create a WAR. In addition to creating a WAR, can maven help create additional JAR? Or can maven create two packages out of one pom.xml?
Or should I create a separate module in the main project with all these packages/classes, and have its own pom.xml to generate the necessary JAR? For this, most probably I need to modify the structure of the main project. I would like to avoid this unless there is no way out.
Can you advice?
It seems like the best thing for you would be to create a multi-module project that both contains the JAR and the other project. This way, you can easily change/build them together, but you create separate artifacts.

Create a maven project to be used as a jar library in another project

I want that a maven project can be used as a black box jar. This is needed because second project was born its way, and I don't want to integrate its code by hand. So the best way is that this project is going to save it's data on db, but it should use a service offered by the "wrapper" project to save them.
The idea is simple, the secondary project can expose just a method to which I will pass the service that offers the save method as a parameter.
The secondary project should not have configuration files, but should rely on the father application's properties.
Any idea to do this fast and almsot good? Thanks for any suggestion.
EDIT 2013/03/07: The idea behind this is that the second project should generate a classic jar library that looks a properties file into the classpath of the host project. Something like Quartz/Spring/... you import jar and you provide the properties file.
I just defined some classes to load properties from the classpath, and some interfaces to make the two projects interact.
In pom.xml of the parent project I imported the child project excluding it's dependencies to avoid conflicts.
It was a pretty easy task at the end.

Why don't GWT launch configurations lookup sources in dependency projects by default?

Why there's a difference in Default Source Lookup Path between GWT and java launch configurations?
In multi-module projects instead of containing projects, the Default folder contains the class folders of those projects!
It causes "Source not found" errors when the debugger steps into a dependency project.
I know I can add projects manually. Just want to know why this difference is needed.
The only project in the list is the associated with the .launch.
GWT needs '.java' source files of dependencies to be able to compile (translate to js) while the Java launcher needs only '.class' compiled files.
I suppose you know GWT has a different way to manage dependencies (through modules within the same project), which is good for some advanced GWT practices like loading a module's js lazily (this feature doesn't work with "foreign" libs/projects).
So this could also be an answer for why eclipse GWT doesn't suppose you will have more projects (but more modules instead)
Finally if you really have an independent GWT lib that you're maintaining this is an issue as you said.

How to create maven modulized project

I want to create maven multi module project, but it should not like normal module project. My requirement is divide web project in to many parts and some module contents common pages, when building project it need to create many web war files.
Is there any maven plugin for this kind of requirement?
Thank You.
Depending on how many war files you need to create, you can use overlays to merge in common pages. This would work if it's ok to have one module per war.
Otherwise, I suggest using different profiles to create each different war. Then you would run the build once per war.

Using Maven 3, how do I overwrite a file defined in one of the dependencies?

I have a multi-module Java EE application including a module for the web archive.
The WAR declares a dependecy on another WAR which provides a general purpose CSS.
I'd like to overwrite the provided CSS in my local WAR to add some specific behaviour.
So I copied the CSS from the dependency and placed it in the very same directory in my local WAR (being src/main/webapp/css/file.css).
I assumed Maven to merge these files, so my changes eventually become visible.
However, after deploying the application I still end up with the general purpose version provided by the dependency.
Is there any solution / plugin to fix this?
What you probably need is Maven's overlay feature which can merge 2 war projects:
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/overlays.html

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