Apache Maven 3 Cookbook

Extending Apache Maven
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5. The next step is to build and install the project into your Maven local repository:
$ mvn install
6. On build success, you can now execute the plugin from the command line:
$ mvn net.srirangan.packt.maven:maven-plugant-plugin:hello
How it works...
hello.mojos.xml contains the definition and configuration of the Mojo. It is the one that
associates the hello goal with the hello.build.xml Ant build script.
The project POM file shows a dependency on Ant itself (of course!). It also makes use of
maven-plugin-plugin with a dependency on maven-plugin-tools-ant.
These together allow Maven plugins to be written in Ant and located in the src folder to be
discovered, packaged, and installed.
If you look at your local repository, you will find that the Ant plugin has been converted into
an artifact (.jar) at repository/net/srirangan/packt/maven/maven-plugantplugin/1.0-SNAPSHOT/maven-plugant-plugin-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Creating a Maven plugin using JRuby
JRuby is a 100 percent pure Java implementation of the popular scripting and programming
language–Ruby. JRuby shares a number of features from Ruby like being dynamic and
reflective. To its audience, JRuby/Ruby is close to being the best thing since sliced bread.
Syntactically, JRuby/Ruby makes it easy to get started and to quickly accomplish programming
tasks that would otherwise take you a while with Java.
But since JRuby is based on the Java Virtual Machine, it compiles into bytecode for JVM and
can interact seamlessly with existing Java infrastructure, much like Groovy and Scala.
Getting ready
For this recipe, you need Apache Maven 3 installed and set up correctly. You also need to
be familiar with Maven concepts such as archetypes, project co-ordinates, dependencies,
and so on.
Additionally, you need to be familiar with programming/scripting in JRuby/Ruby.