ejb-jars, cllients, deployment plans and multiple artifacts

[Jeremy Boynes <je...@coredevelopers.net>]

An ejb-client jar is simply a jar file that contains all classes needed 
by a client that wishes to use an EJB - this would include the interface 
classes and any classes needed to compile against those interfaces (such 
as parameters, exceptions). This is to allow the client jar to be 
distributed to places the provider does not want to have access to the 
bean's implementation.

The advantage of generating these two artifacts together is that it 
would allow the developer to keep all source in one tree. It also 
simplifies the generation of things like interfaces, key classes, DAOs, 
value classes etc. from annotations in the implementation source.

With JSR-88 another artifact has been introduced which is a deployment 
plan. This corresponds roughly to a vendor-specific deployment 
descriptor but it is stored outside the ejb-jar. Thus a JSR-88 compliant 
  deployment tool needs to process the ejb-jar + some other metadata and 
generate this separate plan; it also needs module and plan as separate 
items to pass back to the deployment tool so it can have them 
distributed to the running server. It doesn't seem very friendly to me 
to need to have a separate project for this.

The deployment plan issue applies to any J2EE module - WARs, RARs and 
EARs in addition to EJBs.

I'm new to m2-dev so this may have been discussed already, but would it 
be possible to modify the POM so that it could declare that the project 
would produce multiple artifacts e.g:

<project>
   ...
   <produces>
      <artifact>
          <artifactId>order</artifactId>
          <type>ejb</type>
      </artifact>
      <artifact>
          <artifactId>order-client</artifactId>
          <type>ejb-client</type>
      </artifact>
      <artifact>
          <artifactId>order-plan</artifactId>
          <type>deployment-plan</type>
      </artifact>
   </produces>
</project>

-- 
Jeremy