My project "karchangame" is Ant-based, basically because when you create a new project in Netbeans, the Ant configuration is the default.

This has worked well for a long time, until I decided recently to upgrade some of the libraries that I use. Now, in Ant, you just download the libraries you need and put the jar-files in your classpath.

That works fine if your libraries are not complicated. But I noticed that some of my libraries are now dependant on yet other libraries.

In short, I just spent an hour in getting the libraries I need, then getting the required libraries of those libraries, ad infinitum.

Maven takes care of this whole slog, by putting the responsibility for defining the required libraries for a framework/library squarely on the shoulders of that framework/library.

What I was stuck with was finding the best way of changing my Ant-based project into a Maven-based project.

Moving from Ant to Maven

The easiest way that I could come up with is to create a brand new Maven-based project. The original was a Web Application, so the new Maven project should also be a Web Application. As far as I could tell every possibility for a new ant-based project is also available as a new maven-based project.

And then start moving files over to the appropriate place in the new Maven structure.

I really like the fact that Git actually detects these moves instead of like in the old days, when a move was an explicit delete and create of two non-related files, making you lose your entire history of that file.

The difference in the directory structure is as follows:

You do notice that Maven actually has a more layered structure, whereas Netbeans Ant basically dumps everything in the root.

So, the move basically entailed the following:

From ant	To Maven
build.xml	pom.xml
-	nb-configuration.xml
nbproject	-
lib	- (actually stored in your m2 repo)
src/conf	src/main/resources
src/java	src/main/java
web	src/main/webapp
test	src/test/java
build	target
dist/karchangame.war	target/karchangame-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war

Pom.xml

I only needed to make a few changes to my pom.xml file, in order to get all the dependencies sorted out.

JMockit

Needed to add JMockit, or my testcode didn't compile.

<dependency>

    <groupId>org.jmockit</groupId>
    <artifactId>jmockit</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

AntiSamy

AntiSamy to prevent evil hackers from gaining access.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.owasp.antisamy</groupId>
    <artifactId>antisamy</artifactId>
    <version>1.5.3</version>
</dependency>

URL Validation

<dependency>

    <groupId>commons-validator</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-validator</artifactId>
    <version>1.4.0</version>
</dependency>

It's amazing to see Maven automatically download all the required libraries.

The last part was adding plantuml back into the mix. But I'll talk about that in the next Blog.

References

Apache Maven

http://maven.apache.org/

Netbeans - MavenBestPractices

http://wiki.netbeans.org/MavenBestPractices