[m2e-dev] developing m2e connectors

[Rafał Krzewski <Rafal.Krzewski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

first let me introduce myself - I'm Rafał (that'd be Raphael in most 
other languages), living in Warsaw, Poland. I've been using Maven 1 and 
Maven 2 for years and I have developed some in-house plugins. I've also 
contributed a few patches to Maven few years ago. Speaking about the 
past I've also been Apache commiter a decade ago on Turbine project, ah 
the good days :).

I've been also following m2e development for a while, and using it with 
mixed results for developing J2EE applications. I mean - it's great that 
it was there, but the non-deterministic behavior across workspaces and 
sessions was really frustrating. I welcome the change of paradigm with 
plugin lifecycle mapping. Even if it requires more work, you do the work 
once, and save all the time you'd have to spend chasing phantom problems 
on each and every eclipse workspace that you or your teammates use.

I appreciate that the documentation for extension contributors was 
created. Knowing the dynamic in OSS projects I've decided NOT to wait 
for it :) and started playing with extension development a few weeks 
earlier, shortly before Indigo release.

If anyone would like to take a look at the result of my efforts, I'd 
appreciate any comments and suggestions: 
https://github.com/objectledge/maven-extensions
Here's some minimal documentation 
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/TOOLS/Home and issue tracker 
http://objectledge.org/jira/browse/TOOLS

At this point I have connectors for
http://mojo.codehaus.org/javacc-maven-plugin/
http://jflex.sourceforge.net/maven-jflex-plugin/
http://maven.apache.org/scm/plugins/index.html
That's the mainstream stuff. I have also wrapped
http://docs.cksource.com/CKEditor_3.x/Developers_Guide/CKPackager
in a Maven plugin and created a connector for it, so if you are using 
http://ckeditor.com/ in a J2EE application you might want to take look 
at it.

The connectors are functional and I'm looking forward to releasing a 
1.0.0 soon, the only major thing I'm missing are test projects.

I've also had an idea regarding lowering the barrier to m2e extension 
development - Maven Archetype could be really helpful here.
https://github.com/objectledge/maven-extensions/tree/master/archetypes/connector-module-archetype
is my attempt at creating an archetype for adding further modules to my 
connectors project. A similar archetype for bootstrapping a container 
project for connectors would complement that.

I'd be happy to have my connectors available through m2e marketplace 
once it's released. In case of maven.apache.org and mojo.codehaus.org 
plugins it probably makes sense to have a centralized project on github 
and if this comes about, I'd be happy to contribute my code there.

cheers,
Rafał