Andres Almiray's Weblog

The Silicon Valley Web JUG had its monthly meeting yesterday night, with guest speaker Jason van Zyl from Sonatype. Here is what JUG members received on their mailboxes before the talk

Jason did not disappoint. He not only showed Nexus running and its integration within Eclipse, but also the m2eclipse plugin (maven integration); Idiom, a template consumer for site documentation (think a better maven-site-plugin to start with); and another project (I can't recall the name right now) that lets you build OSGi bundles in the command line, that is right, no need to mess up with a running IDE, how cool is that?

Personally I really like the new level of integration between Maven and Eclipse. I use them both most of the times in my projects, keeping project dependencies in sync is always a hassle, but m2eclipse gets rid of all the cruft. Jason mentioned that one of the goals of the project is configure a maven enabled project without having to actually look at the POM in its XML form. Can't wait to test it.

Nexus looks also very promising, it may work as a proxy for all your repos in your organization, users just have to point to the the Nexus server. It also has a cool feature called routing tables. Think for a moment of that useful open source project you app depends on. You found a bug but the project's team can't/won't react as fast as needed, so you go with patch it yourself and run with the same groupId and versionId as you do not want to update the poms. It works, but it may break other teams in your organizations. So what routing tables do is filter out specific artifacts from specific sites, you may configure Nexus to serve all org.apache.commons artifacts from the official Apache commons repo and nothing else, leaving any in-house patches out of the equation. Definitely worth exploring.

Thanks to Jason for a great talk, Mike and Kevin for organizing the event and Google for hosting.

On a related note I met again with Sven Haiges (@hansamann) and recorded an interview for the Grails podcast. Though we talked shortly about Grails, he made me realize there may be a Grails plugin based on Json-lib. Good times.

Oh and another thing, Aaron Houston kick started the meeting by announcing that Mike is a brand new Java Community Champion, congrats!

eclipse google maven meeting svwebjug

A couple of days ago I saw a news bit at dzone about Swingx 0.9.1 being available from maven's central repository, so I proceeded to update GraphicsBuilder's dependencies and then discovered that TimingFramework is also there, thanks Chet!

You'll have to add the following lines to your dependencies section
<dependency> <groupId>net.java.dev.timingframework</groupId> <artifactId>timingframework</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> </dependency>
Does this mean that GraphicsBuilder support animations through TimingFramework? no, at least not yet

graphicsbuilder java maven swing

For those of you that like to use maven, the latest release of JsTester is available at http://jstester.sourceforge.net/m2/repo/release/net/sf/jstester/jstester/.

Enjoy!

jstester maven

For those Maven fans out there, Json-lib's project site has a repo that you may use while it gets sync'ed to Maven's central repo. The link is http://json-lib.sourceforge.net/m2/repo/release/.

json-lib maven

When working with maven2's site descriptor, have you ever had the need to add more logos to the menu ? or add extra css stylesheets without overriding the default ones ? Since I started using Maven2 I always wanted to do just that but couldn't find any information on the project site. Doing a little research lately I stumbled upon a post from Alex Schwartz at the maven user list describing how he added more logos, similar to the "powered by" Maven logo.

Here is how it can be done: There is a tag  poweredby  which can be placed in the site.xml nested in the top-level node. A poweredby element may contain at least one logo element.
<poweredBy> <logo name="Hosted on SourceForge.net" href="http://sourceforge.net" img="http://sflogo.sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=&type=2" /> <logo name="Build with Maven 2" href="http://maven.apache.org" img="images/logos/maven-feather.png" /> </poweredBy>
The answer to other issue was "hidden" at Maven's site howto as you must specify an alternative Velocity template for your site inside the pom. The trick was looking at the default template, located inside the doxia-site-renderer plugin. First you must configure the plugin as follows:
... org.apache.maven.plugins maven-site-plugin ${basedir}/src/site site.vm ...
Inside that template file you may define new Velocity macros and everything you need, like adding new stylesheets and custom javascript. For example, if you want to add the SyntaxHighlighter, add the following lines to site.vm:


maven