Maven best practice for generating multiple jars with different/filtered classes ?

Posted by jaguard on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jaguard
Published on 2010-03-11T10:03:54Z Indexed on 2010/03/11 19:24 UTC
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I developed a Java utility library (similarly to Apache Commons) that I use in various projects. Additionally to fat clients I also use it for mobile clients (PDA with J9 Foundation profile). In time the library that started as a single project spread over multiple packages. As a result I end up with a lot of functionality but not really needed in all the projects.

Since this library is also used inside some mobile/PDA projects I need a way to collect just the used classes and generate the actual specialized jars

Currently in the projects that area using this library, I have Ant jar tasks that generate (from the utility project) the specialized jar files (ex: my-util-1.0-pda.jar, my-util-1.0-rcp.jar) using include/exclude jar task features. This is mostly needed due to the generated jar size constraints for the mobile projects.

Migrating now to Maven I just wonder if there are any best practices to arrive to something similar so I consider the following scenarios:

[1] - additionally to the main jar artifact (my-lib-1.0.jar) also generating inside my-lib project the separate/specialized artifacts using classifiers (ex: my-lib-1.0-pda.jar) using Maven Jar Plugin or Maven Assembly Plugin filtering/includes ... I'm not very comfortable with this approach since it pollute the library with library consumers demands (filters)

[2] - Create additional Maven projects for all the specialized clients/projects, that will "wrap" the "my-lib" and generate the filtered jar artifacts (ex: my-lib-wrapper-pda-1.0 ...etc). As a result, these wrapper projects will include the filtering (to generate the filtered artifact) and will depend just on the "my-lib" project and the client projects will depend on my-lib-wrapper-xxx-1.0 instead of my-lib-1.0. This approach my look problematic since even that will let "my-lib" project intact (with no additional classifiers & artifacts), basically will double the number of projects since for every client project I'll have one just to collect the needed classes from the "my-util" library ("my-pda-app" project will need a "my-lib-wrapper-for-my-pda-app" project/dependency)

[3] - Into the every client project that use the library (ex: my-pda-app) add some specialized Maven plugins to trim - out (when generating the final artifact/package) the un-needed classes (ex: maven-assembly-plugin, maven-jar-plugin, proguard-maven-plugin)

What is the best practice for solving this kind of problems in the "Maven way" ?!

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