Maven Target Set

Maven brought the idea of standard project directory tree structures and standardized project lifecycles to the world of Java project builds. With Ant you have to specify everything about the build, with Maven everything is standardized. Ant has the benefit of being completely general, Maven has the benefit of convention. Gant sits with Ant, it is a gneral mechanism for scripting Ant tasks using Groovy rather than XML. Using a dynamic programming language means that it is possible to write complete target sets that can be included. So we don’t have to use a completely different framework to harness the power of convention. Examples of prepackaged target sets are gant.targets.Clean and gant.targets.Maven. These are, in effect, mixins that can be used to create build specifications.

An example:

includeTargets << gant.targets.Maven

maven.groupId = 'org.codehaus.gant'
maven.artifactId = 'gant'
maven.version = '1.2.1-SNAPSHOT'
maven.javaCompileProperties = [source: '1.5', target: '1.5', debug: 'true']
maven.deployURL = 'https://dav.codehaus.org/repository/gant'
maven.deploySnapshotURL = 'https://dav.codehaus.org/snapshots.repository/gant'

setDefaultTarget install

The Maven target set imports the targets: initialize, compile, test-compile, test, package, install, and deploy. We can add any other targets just as we might in any Gant file.

An alternative way of writing this is:

includeTargets ** gant.targets.Maven * [
    groupId: 'org.codehaus.gant',
    artifactId: 'gant',
    version: '1.2.1-SNAPSHOT',
    javaCompileProperties: [source: '1.5', target: '1.5', debug: 'true'],
    deployURL: 'https://dav.codehaus.org/repository/gant',
    deploySnapshotURL: 'https://dav.codehaus.org/snapshots.repository/gant'
    ]

setDefaultTarget install

With either of the above, we can see what targets are available using the -p (or -T) option:

|> gant -p

 clean         Action the cleaning.
 clobber       Action the clobbering.  Do the cleaning first.
 compile       Compile the source code in src/main to target/classes.
 deploy        Deploy the artefact: copy the artefact to the remote repository https://dav.codehaus.org/snapshots.repository/gant.
 initialize    Ensure all the dependencies can be met and set classpaths accordingly.
 install       Install the artefact into the local repository.
 package       Package the artefact as a jar in target/classes.
 site          Create the website.
 test          Run the tests using the junit unit testing framework.
 test-compile  Compile the test source code in src/test to target/test-classes.

Default target is install.

NB The site target does not work as yet. Note that the comments explain as much as possible about the action inclusing sources and targets where known. The above example is for building Gant itself – the 1.0.1-SNAPSHOT version.

For those people who prefer to use Test’N’Groove rather than JUnit for unit tests, simply specify the testFramework property to be ‘testng’. So for example, the ADS Package build file is:

includeTargets ** gant.targets.Maven * [
    groupId: 'org.devjavasoft',
    artifactId: 'ads',
    version: '3.1.0',
    javaCompileProperties: [source: '1.6', target: '1.6', debug: 'true'],
    testFramework: 'testng'
]

cleanPattern << '**/*~'

setDefaultTarget test

NB The Maven target set automatically pulls in the Clean target so we can use the standard Gant clean support features. Checking the available targets for the above Gant file:

|> gant -p

 clean         Action the cleaning.
 clobber       Action the clobbering.  Do the cleaning first.
 compile       Compile the source code in src/main to target/classes.
 deploy        Deploy the artefact: copy the artefact to the remote repository .
 initialize    Ensure all the dependencies can be met and set classpaths accordingly.
 install       Install the artefact into the local repository.
 package       Package the artefact as a jar in target/classes.
 site          Create the website.
 test          Run the tests using the testng unit testing framework.
 test-compile  Compile the test source code in src/test to target/test-classes.

Default target is test.

Note that the test target tells us which unit test framework is being used. Groovy’s GString in action.

What about dependencies? Simply add to the compileDependencies or testDependencies property, for example:

maven.testDependencies << [groupId: 'org.testng', artifactId: 'testng', version: '5.8', scope: 'test', classifier: 'jdk15']

A dependency is a hash with keys for all the attributes required by the Maven dependency resolution system. During completion of the initialize target all specified dependencies will be checked for presence in the standard Maven local repository or downloaded if not present. Although we have presented the example of downloading TestNG here, you don’t need it for using Test’N’Groove since this dependency is automatically added when testFramework is set to ‘testng’.

Currently the list of amendable properties is:

groupId: ''
artifactId: ''
version: ''
sourcePath: 'src'
mainSourcePath: '${properties.sourcePath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}main'
testSourcePath: '${properties.sourcePath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}test'
targetPath: 'target' ,
mainCompilePath: '${properties.targetPath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}classes'
testCompilePath: '${properties.targetPath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}test-classes'
testReportPath: '${properties.targetPath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}test-reports'
metadataPath: '${properties.mainCompilePath}${System.properties.'file.separator'}META-INF'
javaCompileProperties: [source: '1.3', target: '1.3', debug: 'false']
groovyCompileProperties: [:]
compileClasspath: []
testClasspath: []
compileDependencies: []
testDependencies: []
testFramework: 'junit'
testFrameworkVersion: '3.8.2'
testFrameworkClassifier: 'jdk15'
packaging: 'jar'
deployURL: ''
deploySnapshotURL: ''
deployId: 'dav.codehaus.org' ,
manifest: [:] ,
manifestIncludes:  [] ,

Options for testFramework are currently ‘junit’ and ‘testng’. Options for packaging are currently ‘jar’ and ‘war’ (but the war packaging has not been tested).

NB The Maven target set is a work in progress. Currently it seems to work for simple Maven structured projects, but it does not yet have all the plugin control facilities of Maven itself. If you find anything that is missing or doesn’t work, please create a JIRA issue.