Hello,
My name is Alexandre Palma. I work in the R&D team of company which produces web-based solutions for the financial market.
We have recently started to adapt our java project's structures to use Maven, and we have also adhered to m2e and m2e-wtp, from which we greatly benefit, and they have become vital tools in our development process.
We have, though, a little problem with the way m2e-wtp handles overlays, which I've been bypassing by making a little modification to it's source code and building in-house versions of it to fit our need, which I believe may be the need of other developers as well.
What happens is that we need our modules to be served without being published, and the zip files m2e-wtp attaches to the deployment assembly cannot be deployed in this way. But I noticed that m2e-wtp already extracts the overlays zip files to the directory "target\m2e-wtp\overlays", and if those directories be attached to the deployment assembly instead of the zip files it works both ways, publishing and not publishing modules.
The modification I made is in the org.eclipse.m2e.wtp.OverlayConfigurator class (which is attached in this message) is to attach those directories to the deployment assembly. It was certainly not done in the best possible way, given my little understanding of m2e-wtp's architecture and the eclipse API itself, but I hope it'll at least help to illustrate what is being proposed.
It'd be greatly appreciated if a change to attach directories instead of zip files could be incorporated to m2e-wtp. I believe it would have no impact the way it works and it would also improve performance, since it would not have to extract zip files every time the application is published.
I apologize for my poor English and hope that you could understand what I tried to explain.
Regards and thanks in advance,
Alexandre
