Aw: Improve connection between Maven and IDE?

[Hannes Wellmann <ha...@gmx.de>]

From all the responses, where I had the impression that they went into different directions, it is not clear to me what the general conclusion of the discussion is?
Do you eventually plan to consider some of the concepts of the 'BuildContext/IncrementalBuild'-API for the new Maven-API in Maven 4, 4.1 (or later)?
If yes, please let us know when discussions happen where interested IDE maintainer can provide feedback/input.
 
 
Regards,
 
Hannes
 
 

Gesendet: Sonntag, 25. September 2022 um 19:26 Uhr
Von: "Hannes Wellmann" <we...@gmx.net>
An: dev@maven.apache.org
Betreff: Improve connection between Maven and IDE?
Hello Maven developers,
 
for the Maven integration for Eclipse IDE (called M2Eclipse or M2E) there is a mechanism of so called "connector plugins" or "connectors" which connect Maven plug-ins with the IDE. Their job is to tell the IDE what to do during a workspace-build within the IDE, if the connected plug-in is encountered when building a Maven-project. They decide if the maven-plugin is executed or not and can perform necessary extra configuration. But one important and often the only actual relevant task of such connector is to tell the Eclipse IDE which files have been updated so that it can refresh the internal data about those files and react to the changes if necessary. Therefore the need for a connector often vanishes if the plug-in would notify the IDE about the files it just changed.
 
In order to deliver such notifications to the IDE the 'sisu-build-api' [1] project incubated the concept of a 'BuildContext' [2] that can be used by mojos to perform file-system operations like create new files or refresh the state of a file. Additionally it provides information about deltas since the last (incremental) build and therefore acts as cache. Maven Plugins then use the BuildContext to perform their file-system operations instead of using corresponding Java APIs directly. The default implementation, which is used in a standalone Maven build is rather straight forward and just performs the corresponding operation respectively always answers that a file has changed. [3] But within the IDE an enhanced BuildContext can be injected into the Maven session that notifies the IDE when a file-system operation happened and properly maintains the cache/delta data.
 
Plug-ins that would for example benefit from that are the maven-clean-plugin and the maven-dependency-plugin. They only delete or copy/unpack files and the IDE only has to be notified about that.
 
While the 'sisu-build-api'-project never left the prototype status and the repository has been archived in the meantime, the general idea still seems to be suitable. Therefore we, the Maven2Eclipse team, want to ask if there is a general interest from the Maven dev team to improve the connection between maven and IDEs by using such an approach? You can find the discussion at M2E with some more details under. [4] A corresponding API with default implementation for standalone Maven builds could be maintained as part of Maven so that not only Eclipse can use it. Of course the API could be reworked to better fit the most common usage patterns. Suggestions for other approaches to improve the connection without the need to maintain 'connectors' would of course be welcome as well.
 
 
Regards
 
Hannes
 
[1] - https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api
[2] - https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api/blob/master/src/main/java/org/sonatype/plexus/build/incremental/BuildContext.java[https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api/blob/master/src/main/java/org/sonatype/plexus/build/incremental/BuildContext.java]
[3] - https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api/blob/master/src/main/java/org/sonatype/plexus/build/incremental/DefaultBuildContext.java[https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api/blob/master/src/main/java/org/sonatype/plexus/build/incremental/DefaultBuildContext.java]
[4] - https://github.com/eclipse-m2e/m2e-core/discussions/876[https://github.com/eclipse-m2e/m2e-core/discussions/876]
 
 

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