I've heard talk about the debatable value of profiles, and I wanted to describe one use I might have for profiles, although I'm still in the initial stages of converting a large Ant environment to Maven, so things may change. I'd appreciate any comments.
I think one basic reason that profiles become useful is that we can't control every aspect of our environment. This "environment" as I describe it, consists of a large enterprise web application, although there are actually 2-3 different EARS that are built for different but related purposes. The applications are composed of a bunch of modules that are divided on functional and team boundaries (front-end Java, back-end Java, web modules, middleware, et cetera). When developers build the present system, they have to check out all of the modules that contribute to the EAR, and they have to check them out with their default name, because the build has hard-coded references to the directory names. The work for each release, about every month, is done on a branch named for that release. If the work for a release includes changes in a particular module, then that module is branched so that developers can do the work required for it. Developers often have to do some work on more than one branch, in the same module. So, in order to do a complete Ant build, you have to have all the required module names checked out with their default names. Some modules can do unit and even "integration" unit testing without building the EAR (back-end and middleware modules), so that doesn't require checking out the module with the default name. A typical strategy is to create separate Eclipse workspaces, each of which has all the required modules checked out, but for different branches. Personally, I find it a pain to switch workspaces in Eclipse, because I have a lot of modules, and startup takes quite a while. As a result, I often end up checking out many modules with a name like "<default>-<branchname>", especially if I don't have to build the EAR with that module, but just be able to inspect the code, or get unit/integration tests working. So, in converting this to Maven, I envision an almost 1-1 correspondence between the Ant projects and Maven projects, except the "build" project will just run the build (previously, we had sort of a "chain" system, where module builds chained to the next required module), and "ear" projects will specify just the needed dependencies and the assembly phase, not to mention a parent POM or two. I want to allow for the possibility of not requiring modules to be checked out with their "default" names, so I want to have module references that reference property values, instead of hardcoded names. It seems to me that if I define a profile in my settings.xml that corresponds to a branch, I can define the property values for each module name, and then I can either specify the profile on the command line, or if I'm working for a few hours on one branch, I can just change the default profile. I think this can work. Another desire I have is to allow for developers not even building most of the modules, and just letting the "ear" project pull snapshot artifacts from the Nexus repo (built by the release team or continuous integration). I could do this with multiple "build" projects, including different sets of "module" elements. That seems messy, however. I wish I had different options for setting that up, perhaps in a profile, but I don't see how that could work. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org
