[MOBY-dev] jMoby and Eclipse/Maven

[Martin Senger]

I was informed (and I witnessed it myself) that sometimes there are problems
between Eclipse and Ant (this is not only about jMoby but generally). I was
not able to tell exactly when it happens (so for example, I could not tell
Andreas how to reproduce it) but roughly speaking it was about this:

1) Eclipse's Maven plugin uses files pom.xml (in the project root and in the
src/main, and others, source trees). Our Ant's build.xml uses
xmls/project.pom. It has a task 'initeclipse' that copies xmls/project.pom
into one or more pom.xml files.

2) When there is a change in the jMoby dependencies, the general practice
(recommended to jMoby Eclipse developers) is to
   a) disable Maven plugin in Eclipse (so it does not read anymore pom.xml),
   b) recreate pom.xml files by calling the Ant's task (usually 'config') -
usually directly form the Eclipse's Ant view,
   c) refresh Eclipse (so it knows about the new pom.xml files), and
   d) enable Maven plugin in Eclipse.

After these steps Eclipse re-builds the project - and (here is my main
point) *removes* various configuration files (such as log4j.properties) from
the build/classes directory - the files that were put there in step 2b by
'ant config'.

This week, I found (thanks to a visitor from France) how to avoid this
unfortunate Eclipse behaviour. Andreas, could you please consider the
following?

* check if the steps above really do make/cause this problem (I saw it but
it may be different on different platforms?),

* try if the solution (see below) helps,

* add it to your (or other) jMoby-Eclipse documentation?

The solution is to uncheck a single box in
Windows->Preferences->Java->Compiler->Building->OutputFolder "Scrub output
folders when cleaning projects".

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Senger
email: martin.senger at gmail.com,m.senger at cgiar.org
skype: martinsenger