Until now I used the Eclipse plugin to develop and test Google App Engine applications. Today I tried the Maven GAE Plugin, in order to become more flexible and independent from Eclipse. My first observations were:
- As I started with the Maven GAE Archetype, the package declaration of the generated code did not match the actual file location. That needed to get corrected first.
- I changed the compiler settings from 1.6 (default settings of the archetype) to 1.5 and had to remove some @Override annotations.
- The gae.home property is undefined (which makes sense), but I had to define it to run the development server.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with the first run. Although Maven adds a lot of overhead, and the actual build process took a bit too long initially to download all dependencies, the overall impression is very good.
Hi Moritz,
Could you please tell how you set up the gae.home property?
What value do you put?
thank you
Ludovic
Hi Ludovic,
the value of the gae.home property should be the absolute path of your GAE installation on your local machine. You have to put that property either in the USER_HOME/.m2/settings.xml (globally) or in your project’s pom.xml. Check out http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnref-book/reference/resource-filtering.html and http://blog.cloudme.org/2010/04/mavenizing-my-project/ as an example.
However, the latest releases of the GAE plugin have a very nice feature, which makes setting the gae.home property obsolete: with gae:unpack you can install GAE in your local Maven repository, no property settings required.