Am 04.01.2012 19:45, schrieb Shamitha Reddy: > the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server, can be made available within Maven
Hi Shamitha, some introductory information what Maven is and how it is used can be found in various places, for example [1] [2] [3] Your customer most likely wants to use Maven to build Java projects, and use your JDBC driver "the Maven way", that is, pull the JAR file into the compilation or runtime classpath using Maven's "dependency mechanism". This is commonly and most easily done by uploading it into a corporate maven repository, managed by some Repository Manager like Nexus [4], Artifactory [5] or Archiva [6]. They all have a mechanism to upload JAR files which were not built/deployed by Maven. The only thing you or your customer have to take care of is to assign a unique identifier to this JAR file. For Maven, this 'identifier' is a structured one, consisting of groupId, artifactId and a version (and a type, but this is 'jar' by default, and thus does not need to be specified explicitly). This is the approach I'd recommend. Each Maven installation is then set up in a way that all requests to provide dependency artifacts (i. e. library JAR files) automatically go to the central repository manager, which distributes these artifacts to the maven installations on demand. This is a one-time setup effort and can be automated. If your customer wants to avoid the effort to set up a repository manager, you can also install the JAR file into Maven's local artifacts cache (so-called 'local repository'), by default living under $HOME/.m2/repository. This is typically done using the maven-install-plugin and its 'install-file' goal [7]. This might look easier at first, but since there is no corporate-wide repository manager, this step has to be performed on *each* Maven installation which should be used to compile/run Java code which employs your JDBC driver. Depending on organisation size, this can become cumbersome, especially when your JDBC driver is updated (you need to re-do this for the new version). You should ask your customer if they have already set up a corporate-wide Maven repository manager. Most likely, if they're not totally new to Maven and already doing serious software development with it, they'll have one anyway. Another option is to make your JAR file compatible with the requirements of "the world-wide central library of Maven artifacts", or "Maven Central" for short. This means some more preparation from your side [8] and is only advisable if your product is intended to be used by a wide audience, preferrably as open source software. Your JAR file could then be deployed to Maven Central and any Maven installation could automatically pull it from there, without the need for uploading it to a corporate repository manager first. Best regards Ansgar [1] http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnref-book/reference/index.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Maven [3] http://maven.apache.org/ [4] http://nexus.sonatype.org/ [5] http://www.jfrog.com/products.php [6] http://archiva.apache.org/ [7] http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-install-plugin/usage.html [8] https://docs.sonatype.org/display/Repository/Sonatype+OSS+Maven+Repository+Usage+Guide
