I’ve been working on Chama recently and have been making some good progress. One of the last big hurdles before getting all of the Model, View, Controller generation working has been:
- Connecting to a database and gathering metadata – 90% complete (just have the relationship, primary key, foreign key stuff to work out)
- Getting Chama packaged up as a real distributable app that you can download and get up and going quickly
Rather than go through a whole bunch of Ant copy scripts and integrating that with my Maven build I decided to write a plugin that would copy everything over into a specific directory structure and zip up for me (and I can also add in the tar.gz stuff real easy now too). I gotta say it wasn’t too difficult, although the docs leave a lot to be desired in this department. With all the plugins out there you would think this would be more fleshed out, especially since they want everyone to move away from the old Jelly scripts that people wrote in Maven 1. Anyways, it’s fairly simple to do with some caveats.
- There appear to be no docs on what all the custom expressions are such as:
expression="${project}"expression="${project.build.directory}"expression="${component.org.codehaus.plexus.archiver.manager.ArchiverManager}"
- Or if you can actually use expressions like these when setting default values of properties (you can, at least that’s what I’ve gathered by looking at other plugins)
- And if you do or do not need to have getters and setters for your variables that you’ve “annotated” (I say that in quotes because it doesn’t act like true annotations, or at least there isn’t a package in Maven called annotations where you can find docs on all of these)
- My assumption is that at least the setters are necessary so that it can use those to populate the variables you want Maven to populate your plugin with)
All that said it was mostly easy to write my little packaging plugin as I was willing to dig through the source code of some of the existing plugins that were doing similar things (maven-assembly-plugin and maven-war-plugin). That isn’t to say that I’m 100% sure I understand exactly how everything works (good idea but not 100% 
.
If I get a chance I’ll see if I can contribute something a little more to the plugin docs than what is there currently because others shouldn’t have to do what I did to get through this and it isn’t that difficult once you know the secret handshake.
