IAM/q4e 0.7.0 has been released

The Eclipse IAM/q4e team has released a new version.

I would talk about the new features, but there is an extremely nice New and Noteworthy page on the wiki which has saved me some work.

I would point out only a few features that I really like:

1. Autocompletion for dependencies in pom.xml. This is nicely done by installing the WTP XML editor if your eclipse doesn’t have it. Suggestions come from the new artifact search framework.
2. Using maven mojos in the workspace for your builds. This new feature will be really useful for maven plug-in developers… we want your feedback!
3. An upgraded embedder which allows the use of Maven 2.0.9 features (and plug-ins using those feaures).

Hope you enjoy using q4e as much as we enjoyed making this release!

Q for Eclipse closer to becoming an Eclipse Project

Q for Eclipse, or q4e for short, is an open-source and open-development eclipse plug-in for bridging the gap between Eclipse and Maven. It is available from its google code home.

Since we believe that every eclipse user should be able to enjoy the benefits of using maven, we’ve proposed IAM (Integration for Apache Maven) as a new Eclipse project. Of course we offered q4e as an initial code contribution for the project. The proposal is discussed on its eclipse newsgroup (you’ll need to get a password from eclipse).

We’ve been working towards becoming a good candidate for an Eclipse project. The number of committers and the overall project activity has been growing, we’ve provided WTP integration, allowed sophisticated dependency analiysis…  and much more.

Now, we’re gearing towards the final step for donating q4e source to the IAM proposal… getting IAM into the eclipse incubator.

For this, we needed two eclipse mentors.

Well, we’ve got three

• Ed Merks, IBM: Eclipse EMF
• Thomas Watson, IBM, Equinox
• Brett Porter, Exist Global: Maven PMC, Apache member,…

Being an official Eclipse project can only bring good things to q4e. Since we will have more eyes on the project, more enhancements will be requested and more hands will join in.

If you use q4e, feel free to write some quotes on the IAM group. We always like to know who’s using q4e and where!

Exciting times are ahead!

Out of the box web development with q4e

Developing web applications with maven and q4e is really, really easy… try this:

1. Update your q4e version from the development update site
2. Create a New project
3. Select the Maven 2 project creation wizard
4. Give it a name… like webtest
5. Select a web archetype… let’s say wicket-archetype-quickstart (the last in the wizard’s list)
6. Finish and wait while the dependencies are downloaded
7. Right click on the project, Run as… > Run on Server and select a Tomcat server.

Did it work? Sure it did… see it in action! (thank to Joakim Erdfelt for hosting it)

But, wait… this is the same process used for creating any q4e project, right?

Exactly!

Don’t you love when things are so simple?

And you can do hot deployment, edit your classes, save and see changes… edit resources… everything is updated in a few seconds.

This is bleeding edge, so we’re really interesting in receiving your feedback. Drop us a line on the q4e groups.

Support for WTP is only an example of what’s possible with q4e, a proof of concept of its extensibility. If you’re interested in developing support for your plug-in, let us know on the developers list. We can help!

Escaping from the repository trap

A while back I talked about how maven dependency on artifacts published in the repository was an annoyance to IDE users. If you haven’t read it, it can be summarized as if you only edit the code and compile, your maven builds will pick up the wrong dependencies because it will build against your local repository versions, not against the compiled classes.

Well, q4e has moved one step forward to allow you to avoid typing mvn install before you work in a different module.

This is possible because q4e knows what’s on your workspace, so it can take a shortcut and resolve maven artifacts without looking at the repository. Here’s a screencast with a quick demonstration.

There’s more information on q4e’s wiki pages.

MNG-3339, Maven against the IDE

Well, not exactly. But now that you’re reading…

Issue MNG-3339 highlights one interesting maven feature: everything comes from the repository. This is usually fine, since you would like to depend on stable versions for your business, but it is not so useful when you’re developing a multi module project.

Say you have your typical webapp in maven. You might have a module for the model (myapp-model) another for the view (myapp-view) and so on. Obviously, myapp-view dependes on myapp-model. Every time you make a change to the model, you need to install it to your repository for maven to build myapp-view correctly.

Having the source code (and even compiled classes) in the same project is not (yet) used by maven to avoid that extra step of installing to the local repository.

Now, if you’re using an IDE, it doesn’t seem convenient to install the artifact after every change, since installing means running all the test cases, which can be lengthy.

Some workarounds exist on the IDE space, like using the IDE compiler instead of maven’s mojo. But this does not work on every case and, what’s worse, leads to different results when building from the IDE and from the command line. If you don’t install myapp-model, maven will fail to build myapp-view… but your IDE might succeed!

Because this is open source… why don’t you help in raising awareness of MNG-3339. Vote for it, comment on the issue if you have an opinion, watch it or do what would be the best of all options: attach a patch!