Samstag, 3. Oktober 2015

Gradle Plugin for JDO, JPA, Ebean etc in Tangram grown up

As part of the Tangram framework project a set of build related things went into a plugin for the Gradle build tool.
Only in part this plugin is directly related to Tangram but offers some generic tools suitable for many projects.
The plugin does
  • Support underlying of WAR files into others (similar to overlays)
  • Minify CSS and JavaScript codes to be placed in WAR artifacts
  • Byte-code transform model classes for JDO, JPA, and Ebean ORM layers
Up to version 0.9 the plugin was more or less a collection of utility methods. It is now redesigned to do the same job transparently when appropriate and at the appropriate stage of the build process.

Usage

Just a few lines have to be added to your Gradle build script to use these add on functionality:

buildscript {
  repositories {
    jcenter()
  }
  dependencies {
    classpath 'tangram:gradle-plugin:1.0.0'
  }
}


apply plugin: 'tangram'

All of the following steps described here take place without any additional configuration.

Web application underlying

The plugin introduces a configuration named webapp for modules using the war plugin. Dependencies given for this configuration are extracted into the resulting war artifact.
This process is not really described well if called overlay so I call in underlying, since your web application's directory in fact is the overlay so the other archives referenced and included must be an underlying.
If your WAR relies on the contents of another pre-packaged or incomplete WAR, the contents of the latter will be copied into your resulting web application while you can override any file in this archive from your local web application contents directory.

Minification

When - again - used in a project also using the war plugin, all files included from the project directory will be checked for CSS and JavaScript file extensions. Matching files are minified using the YUI Compressor.
It is not possible to minify resource included from archive files. So contents from archives while being included in the resulting WAR cannot be minified. (We would expect WAR files to contain minified resources like WAR files generated using this plugin do.)

Handle Model Classes

When used with Java projects and when some data model classes are discovered, the plugin tries to prepare them for use with one of the ORM frameworks Java Data Objects (JDO), Java Persistence API (JPA), or Ebean.
The OR-Mappers require or recommend to apply byte-code transformations called "Enhancing" or "Weaving" to the class files for the data model related classes.
The plugin supports DataNucleus Access Platform (JDO and JPA), EBean, EclipseLink, Hibernate, and OpenJPA. All the calling options from the 0.9 version of the plugin have be removed and the APIs are auto-discovered so the whole process is now - except for logging output - transparent during build.

Version List

The plugin introduces a version object which collects some version strings for a number of libraries. This ensures that any project using the plugin can use these libraries with recent versions and version changes are applied in sync. The use of this part is optional and you have to explicitly use the versions in your build file since this cannot be applied transparently.
Some random examples:
dependencies {
  compile "org.pac4j:pac4j-openid:$versions.pac4j"

  compile ("org.apache.openjpa:openjpa:$versions.openjpa") {
    exclude group: 'asm'
  }

  compile "org.eclipse.persistence:org.eclipse.persistence.jpa:$versions.eclipselink"
  compile "$versions.persistence_api"

  compile "org.hibernate:hibernate-core:$versions.hibernate"
   
  compile "org.datanucleus:datanucleus-api-jpa:$versions.datanucleus"
  compile "org.dataucleus:datanucleus-core:$versions.datanucleus"
  compile "$versions.jdo_api"
  runtime "org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:$versions.slf4j"

  testCompile "junit:junit:$versions.junit"

  // your container will have this for you
  providedCompile "$versions.servlet_api"
  providedCompile "$versions.jsp_api"
}

Manual Mode

Of course it is still possible to call the methods performing the different tasks directly like described in the 0.9 plugin blog post.
Also it is possible to switch of the byte code transformation for JPA annotated classes by adding to your build file

// build.gradle: 
enhancer.enabled=false

in case this might be necessary e.g. to only use the other parts of the plugin.

Keine Kommentare:

Kommentar veröffentlichen