dIon Gillard – Multitask Consulting Pty. Ltd.

Building Applications with Apache Maven

Building J2EE applications can be a complex process. This session introduces the Apache build tool Maven, it's Project Object Model, the various plugins supplied with the tool, and best practices in managing your build process. Topics covered include:

• Declaring your project with the Maven project descriptor
• Customizing the build process and generated documentation with the descriptor
• Maven's plugin architecture
• The various plugins shipped with Maven that you will regularly use
• Properties commonly tweaked for the plugins
• Integrating Maven with IDEs
• Migrating from Ant to Maven
• Writing your own goals using Jelly, Ant and maven.xml
• The reactor and interrelated builds
• Writing your own plugins

Jelly: Executable XML

Many applications need to provide a simple way of allowing XML and Java Objects to access each other, whether it's parsing XML and creating an object hierarchy, or allowing complex scripting processes to be performed on XML data. Jelly is an easily embeddable utility that provides a vast array of tag libraries for manipulating Java objects and XML, and is the scripting tool used by Maven to integrate Ant and other Java classes. Topics covered include:

• Jelly Scripts: executable XML
• Jelly and the JSP Standard Tag library
• Using Java objects from within a Jelly script
• Scripting with Jelly: forEach, if, while and set tags
• Other scripting languages in Jelly: BSF, BeanShell, Jython
• Working with XML Data
• XSL the Jelly way: JSL
• The ‘util' tag library
• Jelly tag libraries: ant, email, format, html, http, interaction, jetty, jms, junit, log, ojb, soap, sql, swing, swt
• Embedding Jelly into your application

dIon Gillard is the Technical Director and a founding member of Multitask Consulting, an Australia J2EE specialist services company. He has developed for Java since the pre 1.0 releases, helping to provide a wide range of development and mentoring services in several countries across the Asia Pacific region. dIon has worked extensively in the enterprise arena with both government and large business in leveraging J2EE technologies to bring business results. Most recently, dIon has been involved in several open source projects of the Apache Software Foundation, including Maven, Jakarta's Jelly and Latka. dIon is chair of the Apache Maven project management committee. Email: dion@multitask.com.au

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