Mix TomEE embedded and Angular 2 with Maven

Since months a typical web application is a JAX-RS for the server-side and a javascript on the client-side.

This powerful architecture can sometimes reveal some challenges in the build pipeline.

However today it is not that hard to mix both frontend and backend build tools to get a single build pipeline easily integrable in a continuous integration solution.

To illustrate that we’ll digg into how to create an Angular 2 application packaged with Maven.

Customize your TomEE instance with javascript and maven

TomEE Maven plugin got recently a new feature allowing to use javascript (or groovy) to customize the TomEE instance you build using tomee:build goal.

Let’s see why and how to use this feature…

ApplicationComposer Maven Plugin

Even if it comes from test side of OpenEJB, ApplicationComposer is now a solution to develop microservices. Because of this evolution it now gets a maven plugin to be able to go further in the development pipeline.

TomEE new Maven coordinates

Recently TomEE version and groupId have changed.

The new groupId is org.apache.tomee, previously org.apache.openejb.
The new version is common between TomEE and OpenEJB and is aligned on JavaEE version. It means that next major version of TomEE/OpenEJB will be the 7.0.0 version (side note: there is no engagement yet to stay aligned on EE versioning).

Also note that org.apache.openejb.maven groupId for maven plugins has been updated, as well, to org.apache.tomee.maven.

Last change, arquillian OpenEJB Embedded artifactId doesn’t contain the version anymore, as it doesn’t make sense to do
so for OpenEJB (ie arquillian-openejb-embedded-5 is now arquillian-openejb-embedded).

TomEE Maven Plugin: finally server.xml in your pom!

Until 1.x releases to configure the server.xml related to tomee maven plugin (embedded or not) you needed to configure either its direct location through “serverXml” parameter or a “conf” folder containing a server.xml. This is working fine but it was often forcing you to create a folder containing the server.xml only.

Note: if you are not used to tomee maven plugins, you can configure almost all the container through properties in the pom.

To avoid it both plugins now got a new variable to let you provide your server.xml inline!

PDF Helper Maven Plugin

A quick blog post to say I released today the first version (0.1) of pdf-helper-maven-plugin. It hit central pretty recently.

It is a small plugin allowing to concatenate PDFs using Maven.

Apache TomEE Maven Plugin and web developement, easier reload

When developping a web application one boring task can be to redeploy an application for a css update.

There were some solution in tomee maven plugin (mainly synchronization based on timers) but this is not as smooth as it should be.

That’s why the plugin was enhanced for the coming 1.7.0.

Executable jar with TomEE and Tomcat Maven Plugin

Tomcat Maven plugin has a goal to allow you to create an executable jar: http://tomcat.apache.org/maven-plugin-2.0/tomcat7-maven-plugin/exec-war-mojo.html

It is nice but integrated with Tomcat so if you do JavaEE it doesn’t work…excepted if you use TomEE.

End of the hell to add a javaagent to tomee with maven?

Until now adding a javaagent to tomee with the tomee maven plugin needed to get the path of the javaagent with a third party plugin (dependency plugin was common). This was making poms huge and the logic quite useless.

Since few days you can get rid of it.

A little fix and TomEE Maven Plugin works with OpenEJB Standalone!

Hi, since few minutes you can use TomEE Maven Plugin with OpenEJB Standalone (let consider it as TomEE without Tomcat).

Basically you just declare in your pom:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.openejb.maven</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomee-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.6.1</version> <!-- in SNAPSHOT ATM -->
  <configuration>
    <tomeeGroupId>org.apache.openejb</tomeeGroupId>
    <tomeeArtifactId>openejb-standalone</tomeeArtifactId>
    <tomeeVersion>4.6.0</tomeeVersion>
    <tomeeShutdownPort>4200</tomeeShutdownPort>
    <tomeeShutdownCommand>Q</tomeeShutdownCommand>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

When you know the interface we use to handle TomEE start/stop is the same for TomEE and OpenEJB standalone it looks quite obvious but we needed to clean up some TomEE specific stuff. To make it a little bit easier we added an option useOpenEJB:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.openejb.maven</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomee-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.6.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <useOpenEJB>true</useOpenEJB>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Then simply start OpenEJB with your application with:

mvn tomee:run

Note: option like simpleLog still works 🙂