What is This? A Center for Ants?

No, it's a pure Maven plugin for building WebObjects and Project Wonder applications and frameworks.

"Pure Maven" means it does not use the WOProject Ant Tasks which means it runs faster and makes it easier to improve both the plugin and the build process. It's close to a drop-in alternative to the WOLifecycle Maven Plugin, although with some differences (listed below).

vermilingua has seen production use for years in multiple applications and frameworks (including a fork of Wonder) and can be considered stable and safe to use.

Usage

Replace the wolifecycle-maven-plugin <plugin> element in your pom.xml with vermilingua-maven-plugin:

<plugin>
  <groupId>is.rebbi</groupId>
  <artifactId>vermilingua-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.5</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
  <!-- Configuration only if you're using the old 'resources' name for the resources folder
  <configuration>
    <woresourcesFolderName>resources</woresourcesFolderName>
  </configuration>
  -->
</plugin>

Configuration

There are several optional parameters.

• woresourcesFolderName: provided for compatibility with wolifecycle-maven-plugin. Without it, vermilingua defaults to src/main/woresources for WebObjects bundle resources, rather than src/main/resources, allowing that folder to serve it's designated standard Maven purpose, which is to keep Java classpath resources.
• performSplit: when set true, vermilingua will generate an additional "WebServerResources" bundle for "split deployments".

Differences from wolifecycle-maven-plugin

There are some features in wolifecycle-maven-plugin that are not supported at all.

• .patternset files (in the woproject folder).
• Building WAR files for servlet projects.
• .framework bundles: only generates Maven-style JAR frameworks.
• flattenComponents configuration parameter: any folder structure in src/main/components is flattened, as WebObjects doesn't know how to locate components in sub-folders at runtime anyway.
• flattenResources configuration parameter: it's not clear what the use case is for this parameter, as WebObjects can find other resources in sub-folders at runtime.

Other differences include:

• Default location for WebObjects bundle resources is src/main/woresources rather than src/main/resources (which is now reserved for Java classpath resources As God Intended).
• When building applications, ${build.finalName} (set in the POM) will only affect the name of the WOA folder. The insides of two WOAs made from the same project, but compiled with different finalNames, will look exactly the same.