Eskatos’s thoughts on JEE development

This post is only a snapshot of what is available at the time of writing to use Glassfish from maven., seen from the perspective of a simple maven plugin developer (simple plugin or simple developer ?).

Before beginning asadmin-maven-plugin, I searched and tried several ways to use Glassfish from maven. Main use case is simply deployment and undeployment of applications.

There are two ways to do this “programmatically” :

• using the asadmin command, Glassfish specific,
• and using the JSR-88 api, app-server agnostic

Here are all the glassfish maven plugins I’ve found :

• cargo-maven2-plugin on http://codehaus.org/

  The Cargo maven plugin project will provide the JSR-88 way soon or later.

• glassfish-maven-plugin on http://code.google.com

  I couldn’t make this one work, source code available in the subversion repository has not moved since december, 2007. This plugin use the same approach as asadmin-maven-plugin : using the asadmin command

• glassfish-maven-plugin on http://java.net

  No source code, no files released yet.

• maven-glassfish-plugin on http://java.net again

  No source code, no files released yet.

• clownfish-maven-plugin on http://sourceforge.net

  Appears to use the JSR-88 Glassfish implementation. I did not try this one yet.

Appart from this, the exec-maven-plugin allows to execute external commands and some posts on the net provide examples of using this plugin to invoke the asadmin command from a maven pom. Some others posts talks about using ant tasks inside maven pom to invoke asadmin.

In fact asadmin-maven-plugin is based on what Wouter van Reeven explain in a post called Deploying to GlassFish using Maven2 on the AMIS Technology Blog. I was using the exec-maven-plugin the way it’s explained there in my projects when I realized how much xml I had to copy/paste around.

At the end of the day, asadmin-maven-plugin is just a convenience maven plugin to execute the asadmin glassfish command leveraging the “convention over configuration” concept that maven teached to me.

In conclusion, I hope that the support for JSR-88 will soon be available in Cargo as we, developers, mostly need the cargo’s integration api usable from unit tests. On the other side, I hope that beside the immediate need of a working solution I’ll have time to maintain and continue asadmin-maven-plugin development.

Next time I’ll publish some documentation about asadmin-maven-plugin configuration.