Tomcat Maven plugin archetype. Sample talks more than long documentation :-)

As code sample talks more than long and borying documentation (or maybe because I don't like to write too long documentation :-) ), I have writen an archetype for the Apache Tomcat Maven Plugin.

Some features describe in this post are now implemented.

As it's not yet released but soon !, just use :

mvn archetype:generate \
   -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.tomcat.maven \
   -DarchetypeArtifactId=tomcat-maven-archetype \
   -DarchetypeVersion=2.0-SNAPSHOT \
   -DarchetypeRepository=https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/snapshots/ 
....
[INFO] Using property: groupId = org.apache.tomcat.maven
Define value for property 'artifactId': : tomcat-sample (project will be created in ./tomcat-sample )
...
cd tomcat-sample

You can run your webapp with: mvn tomcat6:run or mvn tomcat7:run (depends on tomcat version you want)
And hit your browser to http://localhost:9090 and you will use a very complicated hello world webapp sample :-)

Now you can try: mvn clean install .
You will see a selenium test running (by default firefox), use -Pchrome for using chrome should work too with -Piexplore (not tested :-) ).

Note you have now an executable war.
Try it !

cd basic-webapp-exec/target/
java -jar basic-webapp-exec-1.0-SNAPSHOT-war-exec.jar -httpPort 9191

And hit your browser to http://localhost:9191.
So you have a tomcat7 running our fabulous application and without installing nothing !

More details on the project

This archetype build a simple project with some maven modules. IMHO it's nice layout to use.

basic-api (service interface)
basic-api-impl (service default impl)
basic-webapp (our webapp module)
basic-webapp-exec (module to generated executable war)
basic-webapp-it (module to run selenium tests with generated war)

The application is exposing a REST service called HelloService (in basic-api module)

@Path( "HelloService" )
public interface HelloService
{
    @Path( "sayHello/{who}" )
    @GET
    @Produces( { MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN } )
    String sayHello( @PathParam( "who" ) String who );
}

The implementation is in the module basic-api-impl.
Note we use Apache Cxf to provide REST services (for more details have a look at the various spring files).

The webapp is a simple page based on jquery and twitter bootstrap.

So have fun !