Software Artist

Thanks to Brian E. Fox, I managed to avoid duplication of Flex remoting configuration files in this project. It requires a bit of additional configuration and I hope that Maven will soon provide a simpler way to do this simple resource inheritance thing. But in the meantime, this one will work.

I’m going to update my four-article series to include those modifications, but for those of you who have already gone through it before the update, here are the exact modifications you need to make to the project you got at the end of Part 4.

Creating the configuration module

The first thing we need to do is to create a new module under todolist. That module will contain our 2 configuration files and package them up in a resource zip that can be included later in both the web and ria modules.

So first go to todolist and run the following command:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.epseelon.samples -DartifactId=todolist-config

Then go to todolist-config and delete src/main/java and src/main/test directories. After that, create an src/main/resources directory and copy remoting-config.xml and services-config.xml from either todolist-web or todolist-ria to this resources directory.

Now you need to edit todolist-config/pom.xml like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <parent>
    <artifactId>todolist</artifactId>
    <groupId>org.epseelon.samples</groupId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  </parent>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>org.epseelon.samples</groupId>
  <artifactId>todolist-config</artifactId>
  <name>todolist-config</name>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>make shared resources</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>single</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <configuration>
              <descriptors>
                <descriptor>src/main/assembly/resources.xml</descriptor>
              </descriptors>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Notice the pom packaging and configuration of maven assembly plugin to package configuration according to the assembly descriptor in src/main/assembly/resources.xml file as follows:

<assembly>
  <id>resources</id>
  <formats>
    <format>zip</format>
  </formats>
  <includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
  <fileSets>
    <fileSet>
      <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
      <outputDirectory></outputDirectory>
    </fileSet>
  </fileSets>
</assembly>

Now you can run ‘mvn install’ and you see a file called todolist-config-1.0-SNAPSHOT-resources.zip, with just our 2 configuration file inside.

Including this dependency in Flex module

First, you need to add the following dependency to todolist-ria/pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>todolist-config</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <classifier>resources</classifier>
    <type>zip</type>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Then add the following plugin configuration after the one for flex-compiler-mojo:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>unpack-config</id>
      <goals>
        <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
      </goals>
      <phase>generate-resources</phase>
      <configuration>
        <outputDirectory>${basedir}/target/generated-resources</outputDirectory>
        <includeArtifacIds>todolist-config</includeArtifacIds>
        <includeGroupIds>${project.groupId}</includeGroupIds>
        <excludeTransitive>true</excludeTransitive>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

This will unpack resources dependencies in target/generated-resources. Now we just need to include generated-resources on the resource path. To do that, add the following to the build element, right after defaultGoal:

<resources>
  <resource>
    <directory>${basedir}/src/main/resources</directory>
  </resource>
  <resource>
    <directory>${project.build.directory}/generated-resources</directory>
    <filtering>true</filtering>
  </resource>
</resources>

The last thing we need to do now is to delete todolist-ria/src/main/resources with both configuration files in it because we don’t need it anymore.

You can run ‘mvn install’ again and compilation should pass, which would not be possible if flex-compiler-mojo hadn’t found both configuration files on its resource path.

Including configuration dependency in web module

The process is not very different. Just add the following dependency to todolist-web/pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>todolist-config</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <classifier>resources</classifier>
    <type>zip</type>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Then since maven-dependency-plugin is already configured to copy swf dependencies over, we just have to add an execution configuration to configuration/executions in this plugin:

<execution>
  <id>unpack-config</id>
  <goals>
    <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
  </goals>
  <phase>generate-resources</phase>
  <configuration>
    <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/WEB-INF/flex</outputDirectory>
    <includeArtifacIds>todolist-config</includeArtifacIds>
    <includeGroupIds>${project.groupId}</includeGroupIds>
    <includeClassifiers>resources</includeClassifiers>
    <excludeTransitive>true</excludeTransitive>
    <excludeTypes>jar,swf</excludeTypes>
  </configuration>
</execution>

As you can see, the output directory is not the same here. We could have used generated-resources as above, but using target/todolist-web instead minimizes the amount of configuration since everything in this directory in included in the final package.

Now, you can delete src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/flex directory with both configuration files inside since we don’t need them anymore. And after running ‘mvn install’, you can check that both files are here as before.

Conclusion

The end result of this new project is exactly the same, but since finding out where to put those configuration files was one of my main concerns when trying to build a Flex Java-backed application with Maven, I think it’s far cleaner that way.

As always, here is the final project.

Enjoy!