new Blog( perso );

Developping gwt-maven-plugin was a pain. GWT was clearly not designed with Maven conventions in mind and we had to find many hacks and workarounds. Google Eclipse Plugin didn't made things simplier as it came with some hard-coded path and we had then to satisfy 3 conflicting points of view...

But things change

With 2.1 release, GWT Team is looking to nicelly integrate with Maven. We are in contact to see what changes could occur on GWT side to better fit into Maven. The first visible effort is a new "-maven" option in webAppCreator script to generate a maven compliant project structure and the adequate POM.

The maven plugin allready includes an archetype for same purpose. I'll upgrade it to match the webAppCreator one, with some improvements (including Google Eclipse configuration). I've sent the GWT / Google Eclipse Team a list of feature requests to make Maven / Eclipse / GWT work better together.

As a result, I expect to release a 2.1.0 preview releases of gwt-maven plugin for next GWT Milestones, so that the plugin could benefict from changes made on Google side, and the POM generated by webAppCreator could also use those new features.

I also called for a vote on Mojo Dev List to change the development process so that new release of he plugin match a GWT release, and don't support anymore all SDK history. This will make things technically simplier and will drop a large set of obsolete parameters.

Good days Maven users, GWT will become your favorite toolkit in near future !

Update :
You can test a first preview early-adopter draft SNAPSHOT.
Doc is deployed at http://people.apache.org/~nicolas/gwt-maven-plugin-2.1/ (much cleanup needed)
same URL is a maven repo to get the plugin. Test it using (as a single line) :

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://people.apache.org/~nicolas/gwt-maven-plugin-2.1 \
 -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo \
 -DarchetypeArtifactId=gwt-maven-plugin _\
 -DarchetypeVersion=2.1-SNAPSHOT