[jboss-as7-dev] cant get rid of jetty maven plugin - so lets mavenize JBoss Modules

[Brian Stansberry]

In-line.

On 2/25/13 3:18 PM, Bill Burke wrote:
> JBoss AS and jboss-as-maven-plugin just doesn't meet my needs, so I've
> started the process of fixing it.  I have some initial code, but I need
> to know that my suggestions and pull-requests will be accepted before I
> proceed with the rest of the changes I would need to make.
>
> What missing or very hard to do:
>
> * Jetty maven plugin is great because there is no pre-installation
> needed.  It builds your war, automatically downloads jetty and runs it
> in embedded mode, then runs your tests (if you have maven pom configured
> right).  I'd like to replace this with JBoss AS....But...it is just not
> feasible.  jboss-as-maven-plugin does download the AS7 ZIP artifact if
> jboss isn't running already, but...it unzips the zip into every maven
> projects target/ directory.  FOR EVERY PROJECT.  So, if you have more
> than one test, you are unzipping 100M+ PER PROJECT.  This is just
> unworkable.
>
> * I need the above for my O'Reilly Restful Java book examples.
> Currently I use Jetty and I can't replace with jboss-as-maven-plugin.  I
> refuse to require download/install of jboss and will just stick to jetty
> if I must.
>
> * If you are developing on a subsystem integration on AS codebase,  as
> you build your submodule, you need to either rebuild the distribution,
> or copy the library to the built JBoss distribution.  Its just a pain.
> I'd like to remove this step and streamline integration module development.
>
> * I'd like to have automated AS integration tests in the Resteasy build.
>    This sucks because of the previous problems.  Not only is an unzip of
> AS required per maven project, but I need to override resteasy speific
> AS modules with the current resteasy build.
>
> * You can't distribute a profile of a complete jboss install without
> distributing *EVERY* jar it depends on.
>
> What I'm doing to fix it:
>
> * I've got a pull request for JBoss Modules that allows you to specific
> a maven repository artifact instead of a path for a resource-root: i.e.
>
>       <resources>
>           <resource-root group="org.jboss.resteasy"
> artifact="resteasy-jaxrs" version="3.0-beta-4"/>
>           <resource-root group="org.jboss.resteasy"
> artifact="resteasy-client" version="3.0-beta-4"/>
>       </resources>
>
> Looks in the local maven repository for the artifact, if not there,
> barfs unless you've pointed a system property to a remote maven
> repository.  Then it will download the artifact with a nice updated
> download-progress message displayed on the console window.
>
> Here's my pull request:
>
> https://github.com/jbossas/jboss-modules/pull/28
>
> * I'd like to change the JBoss AS distribution to use this new
> jboss-modules maven artifact feature.  This requires modifying
> module.xml creation as well as creating and distributing a local maven
> repository with the jars needed.
>

This is a pretty big change for our distribution model, particularly for 
doing things like shipping patches. Sounds interesting as an alternative 
form of distribution though. It might work fine as the only form of 
distribution, although I think we'd need to pretty thoroughly vet it 
before making that move.

> * Besides the modified distro, I'd like a new maven artifact that is
> just a zip of the JBoss AS directory structure and the corresponding
> configuration files.  No jars.
>
> * I want to rev jboss-as-maven-plugin to take advantage of these new
> features and distros.  Specifically:
> - Allow a src/jboss directory so that users can provide their own config
> files that are overlayed on top of the config-only AS distro.
> - Make config-only AS distro something you can reference as an artifact
> dependency
> - provide in-pom support for defining new and override modules.
>
> I hope you can see that not only does this make development easier, but
> it also opens the door define JBoss AS profiles that can easily be
> exchanged and distributed.
>


-- 
Brian Stansberry
Principal Software Engineer
JBoss by Red Hat