Blueprint tutorial - ARIES 226

[zoe slattery <zo...@googlemail.com>]

Hi all

I have just committed (with some nervousness) a copy of the tutorial 
that Ozzy ran at OSGi DevCon London. It is in two projects, 
tutorial-modules and tutorial-assembly. The modules are fairly 
straightforward bits of sample code. The assembly uses the maven 
assembly plugin to pull together all of the artifacts required to run 
the tutorial and package then as zip and tar.gz files.

The intention is that someone who wants to work through the tutorial 
would be able to extract either the tar.gz or zip file into temporary 
space and have everything they need to run the tutorial. There a very 
few external pre-reqs, these are Java 1.6, Maven 2.2+ a network 
connection. In fact, at OSGIDevCon where there wasn't a network 
connection, we gave people a copy of a maven repo and some scripts to 
set it up. I've removed this aspect from what I've committed.

The good thing about what I have committed is that it does work (on my 
laptop :-)), the zip and tar.gz files have the content that I expect and 
I ran through the exercises again to check that they still worked. We 
have an opportunity to run the tutorial again fairly soon - that was 
another reason for wanting to commit what I have.

There are some things that may not be so good.

1) The way the assembly project works feels a bit unnatural, there may 
be better ways to achieve the same result. Having said that, I did spend 
a long time with the Maven Reference Guide trying to find something that 
produced the result I wanted.

2) The tutorial currently relies on specific hard coded versions of 
Aries (and other) dependencies. This is something I'd like to fix - I 
just thought it was better to commit what I have and then work on 
specific issues later.


3) I am hoping that this is not going to interfere with what happens at 
release time. The tutorial-assembly is intended to be run from the 
command line (mvn assembly:assembly) and I don't think it should be run 
as part of the regular builds.


I will be happy to fix these (and anything I may have missed), equally 
if anyone knows a better way to do this kind of thing please point me to 
the right part of the maven docs.


Zoe