Maven plugins for Glassfish ecosystem

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

A repository for asadmin-maven-plugin

To ease the use of asadmin-maven-plugin I have set up a public repository that you can add to your maven settings / poms / proxies for maven to be able to download the plugin automagically.

The repositories are :

• Releases Repository : http://asadmin-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repository/releases - contains nothing ATM
• Snapshots Repository : http://asadmin-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repository/snapshots - contains the 0.1-SNAPSHOT

Here is the xml snippet you could add to your pom.xml file :

    <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>asadmin-maven-plugin-releases-repository</id>
            <name>asadmin-maven-plugin-releases-repository</name>
            <url>http://asadmin-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repository/releases</url>
            <releases><enabled>true</enabled></releases>
            <snapshots><enabled>false</enabled></snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>asadmin-maven-plugin-snapshots-repository</id>
            <name>asadmin-maven-plugin-snapshots-repository</name>
            <url>http://asadmin-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repository/snapshots</url>
            <releases><enabled>false</enabled></releases>
            <snapshots><enabled>true</enabled></snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
    </pluginRepositories>

Plus, if you browse the source tree you’ll find two exemple projects, a WAR and an EAR, that use this plugin.

JAXB Custom Binding for Joda-Time

I’m extensively using Joda-Time for handling time in my Java development, client or server side. Joda-Time is the codebase of the coming RI implementation of JSR-310 that will hopefully ship in Java 7.

I often need to work with dates in web services implementations, here is the JAXB custom binding lines I use to un/marshall JodaTime types to standard xs:date and xs:dateTime XML Schema types.

Note : I’m using the RI implementation of JAXB spec bundled in Metro.

Glassfish, Hibernate and WebServices - WSGEN Classpath

Following my quick and dirty how-to about using hibernate in glassfish I came across a small pitfall when dealing with metro webservices.

The glassfish’s wsgen classpath on Glassfish is not by domain, ie. the wsgen tool is not run in the domain class-loader.

When trying to deploy a webservice that returns an entity with a hibernate annotation, I got this following error :

Server logs showed the following trace :

/home/paul/Programs/glassfish-v2-b58g/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-apps/ear-0.1-SNAPSHOT/lib/entities-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar(app/model/entities/User.class):
        warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'org.hibernate.annotations.Fetch':
        class file for org.hibernate.annotations.Fetch not found
Problem encountered during annotation processing;
see stacktrace below for more information.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.tools.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceAP.isSubtype(WebServiceAP.java:360)
        ...... SNIP ......
        at com.sun.enterprise.management.deploy.DeployThread.run(DeployThread.java:223)
error: compilation failed, errors should have been reported
Exception occured in J2EEC Phase
com.sun.enterprise.deployment.backend.IASDeploymentException: WSGEN FAILED
        at com.sun.enterprise.webservice.WsUtil.genWSInfo(WsUtil.java:2

Adding the hibernate-annotations.jar file in the glassfish main lib/ directory added the necessary classes to the wsgen classpath.

Building an EJB3 app using GlassFish v2, Maven2 and NetBeans 6

In an article explicitly titled Building an EJB 3.0 application using GlassFish v2, Apache Maven 2 and NetBeans IDE 6.0, Jacek Laskowski explain in detail how Netbeans 6 can be used by maven users willing to use GlassFish as an EJB3 container.

I’m currently doing these type of things with Netbeans 6 but I didn’t know it was feasible with so few command line maven invocations.

Quick and dirty howto : Use Hibernate in Glassfish V2

For my first post here I’ll write a quick and dirty howto for using Hibernate inside the Glassfish V2 container.

1. Download Hibernate projects
2. Put’em in the domain’s lib dir
3. Change your persistence.xml file
4. Enjoy

Details are following :