On my previous post I explained how painful it was to copy resources (files, librairies…) with Maven and the maven-resources-plugin. And guess what ? I received 2 emails from Maven lovers telling me that for this kind of task, Antrun would be more appropriate. So I thought I should give it a try to be fully honest with me, Maven, and God (you need a bit of faith when Maven is involved). So, keeping the same approach as explained on my previous post (use of a Maven profile, copying one datasource and one jar file…), here is what the pom.xml would look like with Antrun :

</project>
 ...
 <profiles>
  <profile>
   <id>Init</id>
    <build>
     <plugins>
      <plugin>
       <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
       <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
       <version>1.3</version>
       <executions>

        <execution>
          <phase>install</phase>
          <configuration>
            <tasks>
              <copy file="src/main/resources/lwr-ds.xml"
                todir="${env.JBOSS_HOME}/server/default/deploy" />
              <copy file="${settings.localRepository}/mysql/mysql-connector-java/5.1.6/mysql-connector-java-5.1.6.jar"
                todir="${env.JBOSS_HOME}/server/default/lib" />
            </tasks>
          </configuration>
          <goals>
            <goal>run</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>

       </executions>
      </plugin>
     </plugins>
    </build>
   </profile>
  </profiles>
</project>

Ok, it’s only 28 lines of XML. Compare with the 52 on the previous post, it’s a shorter pom.xml. But I still find that incredibly verbose just to copy two files.

If you are around next week in Paris, Zenika and Skills Matter are organising a presentation of Gradle by Hans Dockter. I’ll be there !