Jetspeed2 Build Process Clean Up

Using J2 in its current form requires an in-depth understanding of how J2 build internals operate.

As an example, an integrator wanting to get starting with J2 will want to start with the portal web application and customize it from there. It should be made easy for integrators to get started with the web application without requiring an in-depth understanding of the various sequences in the build process.

A typical implementation will want to create a project as described below:

\sample-portal
+---\etc             Contains the build dependencies
                     definition.
+---\portal-webapp   Contains the portal web application 
                     being built.
+---\src             Contains the portal initialization
                     source (db scripts, etc).

Building the portal in this structure should be possible by leveraging the deployed Jetspeed dependencies:

• Components: All libraries (jars) required for the runtime operation of the portal engine.
• Portlets: All web libraries (wars) required for the runtime operation of the portal engine.
  

Integrator using Jetspeed2 should be able to do so easily and to easily get (through dependencies) the latest versions of the release Jetspeed components (libraries as well as portlets).

The current maven-plugin and portal build implementation rely on the source build (target directories) rather than the dependencies for the assembly of the portal engine, making it more difficult to get quickly started and to keep up with enhanced components.

I started to work on cleaning up the build process with the objective on centralizing all deploy and install activities to the Jetspeed2 maven plugin. This should greatly simplify getting started with Jetspeed2. Work on this issue is being tracked on Apache Jetspeed 2 Jira.