Is it a good Idea to start writing a blog series about Maven, XPages Plugin with the topic “The Parent” on your birthday? I don’t know but the birthday reminds me a lot about my parents. About my father and mother who gave me the base structure of my life and lot of my being. But also my heavenly father, the creator of heaven and earth. The same it is with “The parent” in a Maven based project.

But let me first explain something about Maven. Maven is an absolute brilliant idea. Maven is a bit like God. Maven is an Open Build Tool. Maven can create everything you can imagine…. or Maven ban build nothing. The architecture of Maven is plugin (not to be confused with OSGI plugin or FireFox plugins) based. This means that Maven needs a Plugin for each type of code or project Maven can build. But at this point there are no boundaries.

The POM.xml contains the magic….. or it’s simply the build plan

Like with Lego, it is good to have a build plan. Software is become so complex that it needs build instructions. The main File for this build instructions is the pom.xm. One of the strength of Maven is, that it can build different modules in the right order and combine it to a ship able package. Because of that, there is a Parent file needed. This parent file is normally in the root folder of the Maven project structure. To illustrate this process, I’ve built a folder called D:\EGit\org.openntf.base. I’ve also setup Eclipse Kepler, which contains the m2eclipse Plugin (the Maven integration 4 Eclipse). Unlike to other tutorial, I try to explain all steps directly from Eclipse, without any command line magic 😉

1. Create a new Maven Project

Select “Create a simple project” and select the project location

Give a group ID like you know it from the OSGI Plugin development and also an artifact ID (The artifact ID will be the project name)

Please select “POM” as Packaging Type. This type is used for parent POM files or for pom files that contains instructions for a group of other modules

2. Setup the POM.xml File for our modules

Please open the pom.xml file and add some properties:

For all text sample that you now use, please refer to this file -> https://github.com/OpenNTF/BuildAndTestPattern4Xpages/blob/develop/testpatterns/org.openntf.junit.xsp.parent/pom.xml and copy / paste the fragments.

The properties contain values, which are used in this pom or the child poms.

• tycho-version is the version of the Tycho Framework
• compiler is the version of the java compiler
• project.build.sourceEncoding and project.reporting.outputEncoding controls the charset of the build / reporting process

The repositories

Maven is an Open Build platform and we are using the Tycho Framework to build the Eclipse Plugins and Features. For this reason it is important to have a repository defined, where all the plugins for the compilation and test cycle are. We define 2 repository. The first repository called “notes” points to the local location of the IBM Domino UpdateSite for BuildManagement. This local location can be different on each developer machine. For this reason I use a ${notes-platform} variable, which can be defined outside. I will show later, how I do this. It is definitely needed to do so, if your plugin should be build via Jenkins or Bamboo.

The build section

As you have already recognized, the pom.xml has several section, which represents parts of the build/life-cycle. We start now to pre fill the build section. The first plugin, is the java compiler. As you see in the definition, the section starts with …. each plugin has its own section. The compiler has also ${compiler} variables, which points back to the properties. This means that all compilations based on the version 1.6 and we can at one point change this to a more accurate Java version, as soon, as Domino supports JDK 1.7 or 1.8

The Tycho Plugins!

The next plugins, that we add are the Tycho plugins. This plugins, developed by SAP helps us to build eclipse-plugins, eclipse-features and eclipse-updatesites.

One of the important parts of the Tycho plugins is the target-plattform-configuration. I wanna point specially to the extra-requirements because this section contains the magic to include the notes.jar! It points back to a part of the notes repository.And last, but not least some stuff to complete the build configuration

All done for the <plugins> section….

… BUT we are working with eclipse

And I hope that I’ve understood this part right, but Eclipse needs some instructions how to manage all the plugins, for this we have the following definition, which gives clear instructions to org.eclipse.m2e how to handle maven and some build jobs.

Yes and now we are ready to build our first plugin in this project…..