Abstract

In this short tutorial I am going to show you how you can use services offered by XMvn from your application. As an example I'll use local artifact resolver service that can find artifacts installed locally in the system.

Tutorial

Before you start using XMvn you need to know what API it provides. You can use API documentation and source cross-reference available on this website.

Don't rely on private APIs. All interfaces and classes being part of public API of XMvn state so in their Javadocs. Any non-public API may change without any notice, even in minor releases. So it's best for you to make sure that the API you want to use is public.

XMvn is a component library - it's a set of Plexus components. You need have a Plexus container to use XMvn and XMvn JARs must be part of container realm (if your application doesn't use Plexus then you can create new container, see the example below). Then to obtain class implementing Resolver interface you can simply write:

Resolver resolver = container.lookup( Resolver.class );

Now you can use the Resolver API to find the location of some artifact in the system, for example Apache Commons IO:

File commonsIoJar = resolver.resolve( "org.apache.commons", "commons-io", "SYSTEM", "jar" );

The returned File will point to the location of the Commons IO JAR file or it will be null in case artifact resolution failed for some reason.

A full example is shown below:

• pom.xml:

  <project>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>example</groupId>
    <artifactId>example</artifactId>
    <version>example</version>
    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.fedoraproject.xmvn</groupId>
        <artifactId>xmvn-core</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.0</version>
      </dependency>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.plexus</groupId>
        <artifactId>plexus-container-default</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.5</version>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </project>

• src/main/java/Example.java:

  import java.io.*;
  import org.codehaus.plexus.*;
  import org.fedoraproject.xmvn.resolver.*;
  
  public class Example
  {
      public static void main( String[] args )
          throws Exception
      {
          PlexusContainer container = new DefaultPlexusContainer();
          Resolver resolver = container.lookup( Resolver.class );
          File commonsIoJar = resolver.resolve( "org.apache.commons", "commons-io", "SYSTEM", "jar" );
          System.out.println( "Commons IO JAR is located at " + commonsIoJar );
      }
  }

To compile and execute this example using Maven, run:

mvn compile exec:java -DmainClass=Example