This guide assumes you are using Maven 2.0.4 or later (http://maven.apache.org)

Getting started

Before we get too far ahead, it is important to know some basics concepts of Maven. The most important thing to understand is that unlike Ant, Maven has no concept of procedural tasks that get run. Instead, Maven has a concept of a build lifecycle in which plugins (somewhat similar to Ant asks) can attach to. When you execute a maven build, you specify a point in the lifecycle that you want the project built up to. The phase compile comes before test, and test comes before package, and package comes before install.

Installing

The install phase simply means that maven should build up the project ("package"), and then install it to your local repository (found in ~/.m2/repository). There is can be used by any other maven project you build. To run a basic install, simply invoke:

> mvn install

That's it! Maven will download all dependencies it needs, run all unit tests, package up the jars, and then install the jars locally. You can also find the jars in the target directories of each module. For example, action/target/action-2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar would be where the main jar is built.

Some dependencies, such as JavaMail and Activation, can't be downloaded automatically due to license restrictions. Fortunately, Maven gives you a nice error message showing you how to install these to your local repository. Simply download the required jar from Sun's website and then use the command supplied by the error message to install it. You can then try the build again.

If all goes well, you should see something like:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 Project ................... SUCCESS [0.688s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 API ....................... SUCCESS [2.125s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 ........................... SUCCESS [21.866s]
[INFO] Webapps ............................................... SUCCESS [0.002s]
[INFO] Blank Webapp .......................................... SUCCESS [0.982s]
[INFO] Portet Webapp ......................................... SUCCESS [2.038s]
[INFO] Shopping Cart Webapp .................................. SUCCESS [0.934s]
[INFO] Showcase Webapp ....................................... SUCCESS [3.351s]
[INFO] Starter Webapp ........................................ SUCCESS [1.013s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 33 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Wed May 03 18:23:38 PDT 2006
[INFO] Final Memory: 11M/43M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Other phases

There are other phases that can be useful when working with Maven. The package phase will just jar (or war) up the modules. The test phase will only run the unit tests. The compile phase will only build the source code (but not the test sources). And the clean phase will remove all artifacts, typically the entire target directory.

Build profiles

The next step to building Struts with Maven is to understand build profiles. These are simply slightly different configurations for the build. The following profiles are available:

Profile	Description
default	Builds action-api, action, and all sample webapps
xwork	Includes the xwork build
thirdparty	Includes additional modules that cannot be part of the default build due to Apache rules

In the previous example, we didn't specify a profile so the default profile was used. However, most developers will want to use additional profiles as they work on both XWork and other modules, such as the JasperReports integration.

Specify a profile is as simple as:

> mvn -Pprofile ...

Third party profile

That is, if you wanted to build all the third-party add-ons not included with the default build, you'd simply use the thirdparty profile:

> mvn -Pthirdparty package

Notice that the final output is now:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 Project ................... SUCCESS [0.646s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 API ....................... SUCCESS [2.389s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 ........................... SUCCESS [22.155s]
[INFO] Webapps ............................................... SUCCESS [0.002s]
[INFO] Blank Webapp .......................................... SUCCESS [0.906s]
[INFO] Portet Webapp ......................................... SUCCESS [1.661s]
[INFO] Shopping Cart Webapp .................................. SUCCESS [0.779s]
[INFO] Third Party Modules ................................... SUCCESS [0.003s]
[INFO] JasperReports ......................................... SUCCESS [0.918s]
[INFO] Showcase Webapp ....................................... SUCCESS [2.336s]
[INFO] Starter Webapp ........................................ SUCCESS [0.571s]
[INFO] JFree Chart ........................................... SUCCESS [1.972s]
[INFO] Pell File Upload ...................................... SUCCESS [0.385s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 35 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Wed May 03 18:26:19 PDT 2006
[INFO] Final Memory: 14M/52M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see, the additional modules that aren't part of the default build were not included.

XWork profile

Besides the third party profile, another useful profile is the xwork profile. This one assumes that the latest XWork CVS code is checked out and is located at ../xwork, relative to the Struts project. You can check out XWork using these commands:

cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs login
cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs co xwork

The guest user has a blank password at java.net. If you have your own java.net account, you can use that.

Now you can do:

> mvn -Pxwork package

And you'll see that XWork is included:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 Project ................... SUCCESS [0.774s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 API ....................... SUCCESS [1.969s]
[INFO] XWork ................................................. SUCCESS [8.757s]
[INFO] Struts Action Framework 2.0 ........................... SUCCESS [24.947s]
[INFO] Webapps ............................................... SUCCESS [0.002s]
[INFO] Blank Webapp .......................................... SUCCESS [1.068s]
[INFO] Portet Webapp ......................................... SUCCESS [1.391s]
[INFO] Shopping Cart Webapp .................................. SUCCESS [0.745s]
[INFO] Showcase Webapp ....................................... SUCCESS [3.064s]
[INFO] Starter Webapp ........................................ SUCCESS [0.625s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 44 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Wed May 03 18:31:49 PDT 2006
[INFO] Final Memory: 14M/46M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notice that the build runs XWork before building the main Struts project. That is because instead of using the XWork snapshot release that is already pre-compiled, Maven is now understanding that it should build XWork and use the resulting artifact (jar) from that build to supply to Struts.

Multiple profiles

You can use multiple profiles at once. For example, this is possible and highly recommend for anyone spending a lot of time developing on Struts and XWork:

> mvn -Pthirdparty,xwork package

This is especially important if you wish to use Maven to build your IDE project files, which is highly recommended.

Building IDE project files

Tips

offline mode
skipping tests
mirror
having to run "mvn install" sometimes before the build works

Child pages

Building with Maven