Tag: plugin

PomChecker 1.1.0 has been released!

Posted on by aalmiray

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the PomChecker suite version 1.1.0! PomChecker is a small utility that can verify if a POM or BOM file complies with the minimum requirements for being uploaded to Maven Central. I wrote this utility to reduce the chance of getting an error when uploading artifacts to Maven Central due to invalid or missing information in a given POM. There are no changes in behavior compared to version 1.0.0 however there are now three more options at your disposal for checking the validity of a POM file. The new options include: Running as Read More

Gradle POMs revisited

Posted on by aalmiray

Close to two years ago I posted my thoughts on introducing a Maven-like structure for organizing and building Gradle projects. I dubbed those ramblings The Gradle POM and The Gradle SuperPOM. In truth the latter is a misnomer, instead it should had been “The Gradle Parent POM”. These posts served as an introduction to a new project I had been working on: the Kordamp Gradle Plugin suite. The original goal for this project was to bring order to chaos found in the dozens of Open Source projects I actively maintain. Before Kordamp began, all these projects relied on the tried Read More

Maven features I wish Gradle had: inlined plugins

Posted on by aalmiray

Since the early days of Maven the development team recognized that they couldn’t (and shouldn’t) provide a solution for every problem we as consumers may face with our builds. In order to cater for our every whim and emerging requirements the Maven build tool added a pluggable mechanism to provide behavior as needed, and thus Maven plugins were born. Maven plugins are typically configured inside a <build> block found in the pom.xml file, which lets them contribute goals that may bind to lifecycle phases by default, or just providing goals that you can invoke at any time. But what if Read More

Maven features I wish Gradle had: override task properties

Posted on by aalmiray

It’s no secret that one of the most common properties ever set on a Maven build is -DskipTests which as the name implies, instructs Maven to skip running tests. As a matter of fact that property is read by the maven-surefire-plugin to figure out if it should run tests or not. As it turns out there’s a separate property named skip that instructs Maven to skip compiling and running tests. If you’re curious and peek at the documentation you may notice that the field/property names for skipTest match but for skip you’ll find a property named maven.test.skip. As it happens, Read More

Maven features I wish Gradle had: summary reports

Posted on by aalmiray

For quite some time now, Maven users have grown accustomed to seeing a summary report when a build is run. The report appears at two locations: at the beginning of the build where Maven shows the projects that participate in the current session (or Reactor if you prefer) which gives you a clue of how many projects, their packaging selection (jar, pom, etc), and perhaps more importantly, in which order they will be processed. The second location is at the end of the build where each project display its status (SUCCESS, FAILURE, SKIPPED) plus the time it took to execute Read More

Publishing artifacts to Maven Central with Bintray & Gradle

Posted on by aalmiray

Recently I joined a conversation on Twitter where the OP complained to spending hours to get a brand new computer setup to publish artifacts to Maven Central. The issue stemmed from having PGP signature files moved from one location to another. There are other issues that may arise when uploading artifacts to Maven Central, specially when doing it for the first time. The rules for publishing artifacts are stated here. A common mistake is to omit one of the required POM elements, which will likely trigger a series of back-and-forth revisions until you get it right. This can be frustrating Read More

Does Gradle need build profile support?

Posted on by aalmiray

The need for customizing a build based on a particular environment is a prevalent one. Maven offers an option called build profiles which lets you customize certain aspects of the build but not all. However on the Gradle side of things, there’s no such feature found in core, with the argument being that contrasted to what Maven offers as means for defining build files (a limited XML based DSL), Gradle offers not one but two DSLs based on full programming languages. This allows developers use the same control flows they’re used to in production and test code but on build Read More

Announcing the PomChecker project

Posted on by aalmiray

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the PomChecker suite! What is it you ask? It’s a small set of utilities to verify that a POM or BOM file complies with the minimum requirements for being uploaded to Maven Central. I wish an utility like this existed years ago when I started publishing artifacts to Maven Central. It took me a few tries in the beginning to get the POM files just right. Recently I’ve seen other developers struggling with these rules as well. Hopefully these utilities can help them and others get on the road much faster. There Read More

Detecting duplicate dependencies in Maven

Posted on by aalmiray

In late March 2020 I ran a quiz on Maven Dependency Resolution which turned out to be an eye opener for some people (including myself!). You can read the whole questionnaire, results, and analysis here. One of the surprising results was found in the very first question, a rather innocuous one but it resulted in a major stumbling block for 2/3 of respondents! Here’s the question What’s surprising is that only 36% people chose the correct answer and a similar percentage chose the “Build error” option because clearly duplicate dependencies ought to cause a build error, right? Wrong! Maven does Read More

Announcing the Gradle Enforcer Plugin

Posted on by aalmiray

Inspired by the popular Maven Enforcer plugin I’m happy to announce that its Gradle counterpart has been released, say hello to the enforcer-gradle-plugin! The behavior provided by Gradle Enforcer plugin is very similar to what the Maven Enforcer plugin provides, in the sense that rules will be executed during a particular phase of the build; any rule violations result in a build failure. Rules are typically setup to check for preconditions and requirements. The Maven Enforcer plugin provides a set of core rules and extra rules. In turn, the Gradle Enforcer plugin provides a similar set plus a few rules Read More

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