Maven archetypes to create your project folder structure

Although gradle is my preferred build tool these days, the maven archetypes are still useful for creating a folder structure to start with.
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Tags: devops, gradle, Maven, mvn

Cloudbees

I’ve been using CloudBees a lot recently for deploying to ‘the cloud’.
There are a couple of things that attract me to CloudBees…
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Tags: cloud, cloudbees, continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, jenkins, Maven

Swing, Webstart and Maven – An Example

Following my introductory rant on the subject, this post is a working example of using Swing and Webstart with a multi-module maven project.

Complete source can be downloaded from here.
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Tags: helloworld, jnlp, Maven, mvn, swing, webstart

Swing, Webstart, Maven – a difficult combination

I have spent the last few weeks struggling with a Swing app that I wanted to deploy via Webstart and build using Maven, via the the Webstart Maven Plugin. It has been a hugely painful process. I found the plugin documentation difficult to follow, struggled to understand the subtle config differences in jnlp, took longer than I expected to get jar signing working, had problems with webstart caching and suffered through a plethora of vague error messages. I found this posting where the author vowed to never use Webstart again, and I can empathize. Postings of people asking for help with Webstart problems certainly aren’t difficult to find. Using maven to build the jnlp provides some conveniences, but introduces new problems too. Overall, I’d prefer to avoid using a Swing/Webstart/Maven solution again.
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Tags: helloworld, jnlp, Maven, mvn, swing, webstart

Running Hibernate unit tests with Maven

I recently converted a project I have been working on to use Maven. After setting up all the dependencies in the pom, I got everything compiling fine but ran into problems getting the unit tests to pick up the hibernate config (hibernate.cfg.xml) and hibernate mapping (*.hbm.xml) files. With hindsight, it is straightforward, but it took me a while to figure it out so I thought I’d post the solution here.

Initially, I had my hibernate.cfg.xml file in the following directory

my-app/src/main/java

And when I first tried to run my hibernate unit tests (mvn test), I got this error:

SessionFactory creation failed.org.hibernate.HibernateException: /hibernate.cfg.xml not found

Some checking of the maven docs and some forums revealed the following possible solutions:
1) Copy the hibernate.cfg.xml file to

my-app/target/classes

This works, however I think it is a hack as the target folder is generated rather than being somewhere you should actually manually create files.
2) The next solution I found suggested moving the hibernate.cfg.xml to

my-app/src/main/resources

This works well as the contents of this folder are copied to the base level of the my-app/target/classes folder so it is basically a ‘more correct’ solution than the first.
3) The next and I think best solution was to create a new, duplicate hibernate.cfg.xml inside

my-app/src/test/resources

This allows a different hibernate.cfg.xml file to be used for testing and, for example, facilitates connecting to a different database (such as hsqldb) for testing while continuing to use your regular database (such as MySQL) for the app itself.

A couple of points to note:

1) The hibernate mapping files (i.e. the *.hbm.xml files) should also be in the resources folder (in whatever directory structure you choose) to ensure that these too are accessible by the unit tests.

2) I am not (yet) using Spring with the hibernate components, which would likely have changed the above setup.

Refs/links

http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#How_do_I_add_resources_to_my_JAR

http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg54720.html

Tags: Hibernate, Maven, Testing