Any thoughts about best practices for managing archetypes?

[Trent Rosenbaum <tr...@gmail.com>]

Hi there,
I have been using the 'maven-archetype-plugin' and the 'create-from-project'
more recently and I wanted to find what best practices others use when
trying to maintain the development of thir own or company archetypes.

So picture this scene, I start my brand new maven project based the
archetype artifact 'maven-archetype-quickstart'.  I then decide that instead
of starting with a simple 'Hello W'orld application I want a project that
will have an application with a basic Spring configuration that delivers
'Hello World'.  This is great and all that hard work can now be turned into
another archetype and every time I am start a new project I can use this new
archetype.  A few more projects down the line and I know that I want to
start with this Spring configuration and I also want to start with a few
more utility classes as well.  In this example I have also kept my sample
project that I used to generate my initial archetype and so I add the new
utility classes to it and regenerate the archetype.  This is a brilliant
feeling and I am just building on previous work.

So from the example above I have a sample project that I add to each time I
want a new archetype and then from each iteration I have generated archetype
code.  The first question is do other developers version control the
generated archetype code?  I ask this because if the sample project is
version controlled then I know I can recreate the archetype artifact through
the use of 'maven-archetype-plugin' and the 'create-from-project' goal.  My
initial reaction was to say yes, but what about the second part of the above
example where I want to update my archetype to have some new classes.  If I
version controlled the generated code and then checked it out I could then
overlay the newly generated code on top of it.  I could then check in the
changes but I am guessing that it gets a bit fiddly if archetype resources
are removed in later version of the archetype, (maybe a patch would help
here).  I then thought that only the sample project only needs to be version
controlled and then tagged with each update that introduces new archetype
resources.  The release process would be to execute the following command on
the sample project:

mvn release:prepare

Then I would sync to the new tag location within version control and then
execute on the following command on the local copy of the required code

mvn archetype:create-from-project

Then I would move into the generated archetype folder and execute the
following command

mvn deploy


Ok so I know that these steps are a bit all over the place and not as smooth
as a normal release of a standard maven project, but when generating an
archetype it is a 2 stage process.  The first part is to generate the
archetype resources and then generate an archetype artifact from those new
resources.  As long as I have the initial sample project version controlled
I can then recreate the final archetype artifact again and again.

Any thoughts or feedback on how others develop their archetypes?

Trent