mmt-maven-plugin 0.1-SNAPSHOT released

May 15, 2012 - tagged #alfresco #maven #amp #mmt

MMT Maven Plugin

UPDATE
The mmt-maven-plugin have been deprecated in favour of the alfresco-maven-plugin and the Maven Alfresco SDK

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After a month (or so) of experiments, it was time to deploy the first snapshot of a new version of the maven-amp-plugin, the mmt-maven-plugin. Since there is no official documentation yet, I just wanted to share with you an initial draft of the usage and goal configurations; you can start using it already and test it in your builds that are currently based on maven-amp-plugin. The plugin is currently committed as a branch of the Maven Alfresco Archetypes Google Code project, although it could be soon moved to an Alfresco internal code repository.

In a nutshell, the MMT plugin covers all features of his predecessor, the AMP Plugin; the difference is in the code; the AMP Plugin was a rewriting of the maven-war-plugin, replacing ".war" with ".amp" and disabling some code here and there; since it was working fine no effort was ever made to improve it; on the contrary, the MMT Plugin uses the Alfresco Repository internals to perform the AMP operations, drastically lowering complexity and amount of code to maintain.

MMT Goals

The mmt-maven-plugin provides the following features:

• Packages an AMP starting from a simple (and configurable) Maven project folder structure
• Performs AMP to WAR overlay by using the Alfresco Repository ModuleManagementTool and emulating the same process during Alfresco boostrap

Packaging an AMP

• Define your POM as

  amp

• Specify a module.properties file in the project's root folder, containing the properties

    module.id=${project.artifactId}
    module.title=${project.name}
    module.description=${project.description}
    module.version=${project.version}
    

As you can see, the file is filtered with Maven project placeholders

Declare the mmt-maven-plugin in your POM build section, as follows

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.alfresco.maven.plugin</groupId>
      <artifactId>mmt-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

you can optionally define the following configurations to override your Maven project's structure (although not recommended)

<configuration>
  <classesDirectory>${project.build.outputDirectory}</classesDirectory>
  <webappDirectory>src/main/webapp</webappDirectory>
  <configDirectory>src/main/webapp</configDirectory>
</configuration>

AMP to WAR Overlay

To overlay an existing Alfresco WAR file, you'll need the following elements

• Add a dependency to the Alfresco WAR webapp

  org.alfresco.enterprise alfresco 4.0.1 war

• Add the mmt-plugin configuration to run the install goal after the AMP have been packaged

  org.alfresco.maven.plugin mmt-maven-plugin 0.1-SNAPSHOT unpack-amps package install ${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}.${project.packaging}

Please be aware that this is still an experimental work; I hope to give you some updates about this effort by the end of this/next week; meantime, any comment/feedback is indeed more than welcome.