I’ve been writing Java in one sense or another for a few years now. I learnt stuff at university, then used it in a few jobs. I’ve written Beans and Applets, and various bits of stuff in between.

It’s fairly safe to say, that I like Java.

One thing however, that’s been a pretty consistent bugbear in all the time I’ve been writing Java, has been the classpath, and dependency resolution. Luckily, all that can now change.

I used to think that Ant was a pretty neat build tool. All the IDEs supported it, it kinda worked most of the time, but sometimes, building was a bit of a ballache - Some stuff had to be in your lib/ folder, sometimes in Ant’s lib/ too.

Lately though, and this week in particular, I’ve been playing with Maven.

Maven is a pretty fucking cool build tool for Java applications. I suspect it probably works with other languages, but it’s “designed” for Java.

I don’t think I really have the expertise or knowledge to explain how Maven works, partly because I haven’t studied the inner workings that deeply, but also, because it’s far better explained here

Instead, I’m going to dive right in, and explain what I’ve been working on this week.

The company I work for currently, is making a pretty radical shift away from using PHP for everything. Instead, we’ve been investigating Java for creating a middleware layer that everything can talk to.

I’m pretty chuffed with this, but I do wish that it had come a lot earlier on. If it had, I might not have been so decisive to leave when offered a better job.

Basically, when we came up with this project, I insisted that we do it properly, for a change.

I suggested that a good workflow would be something like:

Netbeans IDE -> Maven Project -> Git SCM -> Jenkins CI -> Maven Repository (We chose Artifactory, but I did test Sonatype Nexus too, but didn’t like it).

This is a good pattern for the Joel Test’s “Can you make a build in one step?”

I basically wanted to create a demo project that can be used as the basis for all future java projects, I do the R&D to make the initial POM work, then everyone else can clone this, or inherit from it..

This decision was twofold, I also wanted to figure out JPA/Hibernate and have some clue how that works for reverse engineering the classes from an existing database, the answer to that is: Pretty well, actually. - But that’s another story.

My IDE of choice is Netbeans. I’ve been using it since I was at university, except for a small android-related foray into Eclipse, and an experimental nosing around IntelliJ IDEA.

Stuff I did:

  1. Created a new Netbeans Maven project from the quickstart archetype.
  2. Added the Dependencies on Hibernate (all the sub-dependencies get resolved, and added)
  3. Added the <scm></scm> and <ciManagement></ciManagement> lines to the POM
  4. Added maven-shade-plugin to allow us to build a fat JAR, which makes the jar bigger - it includes all the dependency JARs, but does make deployment a damnsight easier.
  5. Configured <distributionManagement></distributionManagement> to contain the url of the repository we’re using.

That’s pretty much it. Here’s the finished POM, with various bits of secret removed.

When I edit something in Netbeans, and commit a change, there’s a post-commit hook (post-receive) that calls the Jenkins API, and builds the project. Jenkins then deploys the artifacts (a fat JAR and a POM) to the Artifactory.

Epic.