GWT with Maven under Eclipse. What's the development cycle?

Question

I am writing an application that uses GWT, some Spring MVC and Spring Security. Maven is be used to manage the dependencies and Eclipse is my IDE. I've created my application as follows:

webAppCreator -noant -maven -XnoEclipse -out MyApp com.example.MyApp

Then I've imported it into Eclipse as follows:

Imported as Maven project into Eclipse workspace.
In the project settings the "Use Google Web Toolkit" checkbox is ticked.
This project has a WAR directory" is checked. The WAR directory is set to src/main/webapp. The "Launch and deploy from this directory" is unchecked.

Then I test it's all OK:

Click run/debug, choose Web Application (the Google choice), and select target/www as the WAR directory.

So far, so good. Now I want to know how to control the development cycle. For example, I now want to add Spring to my application so I add this block to pom.xml and save it. The Maven Dependencies in Eclipse are expanded to show many new jars (Spring and its dependencies).

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.5.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

I also edit the web.xml to configure the Spring DispatcherServlet...

Once I've edited pom.xml and web.xml, clicking the debug/run icon on the toolbar will simply run from target/www again without any other steps taking place. This means the old web.xml is used, and target/www/WEB-INF/lib doesn't contain the Spring jars (and Spring's dependent jars). Do I need to drop to the command-line and issue Maven commands whenever particular changes are made?

The ideal answer will describe the development cycle for the above scenario.

My configuration:

GWT: 2.1.

Eclipse: Helios (3.6).

Maven: 2.2.1.

JRE/JDK: JDK 1.6.0.21.

Google Plugin for Eclipse 3.6 version 1.4.0.v201010280102.

Maven Integration for Eclipse (m2eclipse) version 0.10.2.20100623-1649 (this has been configured to point to Maven 2.2.1 environment and NOT to use the embedded Maven3 "instance").

Ali Shakiba Ali Shakiba · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-09T21:36:19

I didn't understand you question completely but I use to create a separated gwt maven project and use apache web server to serve gwt files and then config my main webapp to load gwt files at client/browser. That save me from mixing gwt codes with my main webapp.

Edit regarding your comment:

Forget about gwt for start and read on ...

First you need to make sure that eclipse and maven are playing together correctly so that when you add dependency to you pom eclipse will recognize them too, and your eclipse project setup and structure match with maven.

Second you need to set up a web development configuration so that you can run/test your webapp. You can use maven jetty or tomcat plugin or eclipse tomcat server. IMHO using maven jetty plugin is better.

And Finally you need to package (using maven) and deploy (using maven or not) webapp to your deployment environment.

If you have been successful till now, then you can add gwt in using maven gwt plugin.

If you have installed eclipse maven plugin you can run maven commands from inside eclipse but it wouldn't hurt to run them from command prompt any way.

GWT with Maven under Eclipse. What's the development cycle?

1 Answers