guidelines to writing maven plugins considering that maven might be embeded

[Jerome Lacoste <je...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

further care must be taken when writing plugins considering that maven can
be embedded. Maven sort of acts as a container for code. And maven itself
can be embedded.

In particular, I haven't seen any documentation that clearly states what the
plugin developers should do to ensure their plugin is a good maven citizen.


We had this little asynchronous Jira chat on the MEXEC-20 issue:

--------------------------------
> Are there any guidelines to thread / memory management when it comes to
potential embedding ? There should be.

Miklos kleint said:

yup. there should be some docs, but so far it's a moving target generally
and I keep figuring out things that are bad for embedding on the run...

1. use of System.getProperty() in plugins or non-forked threads are bad.
(both get and set)
2. Runtime's shutdownhooks are problematic.
3. setting a context classloader is bad.
4. assuming a working directory (by constructing java.io.File with relative
path) is also troublesome.
5. static memory caches are problem but mostly for components, plugins are
ok there.
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This should probably be expanded and moved to a wiki or the doc. Comments ?

For discussion background see:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MEXEC-20#action_89457

Cheers,

J