Introduction

Consider the following project setup

• api (jar) - GWT library
• gui (war) - GWT gui with endpoint that uses the library.

  With this layout, any change to the api (gwt library) must be repackaged as a JAR and the hosted mode must be restarted to see the change in the hosted browser.

  The following tip explains how to use the build-helper-maven-plugin to improve productivity and hack the multi-project wall between modules.

Build helper

Build-helper-maven-plugin allow you to setup additional source folders for your project. The idea here is to declare the api source folder to make it "visible" from the war project / hosted mode browser.

If you add a source path with the build-helper-maven-plugin directly in the gui's pom you will possibly have problems because of 2 issues.

• At least my IDE (Netbeans) cannot have two open projects that share the same source path. The api module will loose its src/java in the user interface, and the gui will get one ekstra "generated sources" path, this is quite annoying.
• Because there is no guarantee on how the developer will checkout the code, the gui's pom cannot guess where the api's src/main/java is on the disk.

Solution

The solution to those two issues is to create a profile in your pom which you'd only activate when you run the gwt:run target:

<profile>
   <id>dev</id>
   <build>
     <plugins>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
         <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>1.4</version>
         <executions>
           <execution>
             <id>add-source</id>
             <phase>generate-sources</phase>
             <goals>
               <goal>add-source</goal>
             </goals>
             <configuration>
               <sources>
                 <source>../api/src/main/java</source>
               </sources>
             </configuration>
           </execution>
           <execution>
             <id>add-resource</id>
             <phase>generate-sources</phase>
             <goals>
               <goal>add-resource</goal>
             </goals>
             <configuration>
               <resources>
                 <resource>
                   <directory>../api/src/main/resources</directory>
                   <targetPath>resources</targetPath>
                 </resource>
               </resources>
             </configuration>
           </execution>
         </executions>
       </plugin>
     </plugins>
   </build>
</profile>

You can then test in development mode and edit files in multible projects by running:

mvn gwt:run -Pdev

In Netbeans it is possible to save such a run target in the user interface.