A pattern for WebStart in Maven

Java WebStart and JNLP can be finicky beasts, especially when paired with Maven-generated websites and artifact repositories. Over the last few months I’ve developed POM and JNLP template patterns that I think are useful when used with the webstart-maven-plugin:jnlp goal; the main advantage is that applications can be WebStarted directly from the repository, which means that the version available is always the latest -SNAPSHOT or release.

In the POM I define two variables, site.baseUrl and artifactUrl. site.baseUrl defines the server and root path where all Maven-generated websites are published; it has a prefix because usually I’d only set it once in the corporate POM. artifactUrl is the full URL of the project-specific website.

By default both site.baseUrl and artifactUrl point to the location where -SNAPSHOT sites are published, usually by a CI system. They’re overridden in two profiles: release switches site.baseUrl to the release website (which is applied to artifactUrl, so there’s no need to set it again), and devel sets artifactUrl to the local target directory (and omits site.baseUrl, which ends up unused).

<project>
...
  <properties>
    <site.baseUrl>http://repository/snapshot-site/</site.baseUrl>
    <artifactUrl>${site.baseUrl}/${project.artifactId}</artifactUrl>
  </properties>
...
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>release</id>
      <properties>
        <site.baseUrl>http://repository/release-site/</site.baseUrl>
      </properties>
      <distributionManagement>
        <site>
          <id>release-site</id>
          <url>dav:${artifactUrl}</url>
        </site>
      </distributionManagement>
    </profile>
    <profile>
      <id>devel</id>
      <properties>
        <artifactUrl>file://${project.build.directory}</artifactUrl>
      </properties>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
...
</project>

In the JNLP template, the codebase is set to artifactUrl, which means that the resulting JNLP will retrieve any artifact dependencies from the snapshot, release or local output directories.

<jnlp
  spec="$jnlpspec"
  codebase="${artifactUrl}/jnlp/"
  version="$project.Version"
>
...
</jnlp>

Note that the artifact dependencies still need to be copied into the jnlp directory, which webstart-maven-plugin:jnlp does by default. It would be nice to be able to get them from their canonical locations on the repository, but that’s not easily accomplished.

Published by

Peter

3 thoughts on “A pattern for WebStart in Maven”

  1. About the last point – getting the artifacts from the repository, this possible with JFrog’s JavaFX plugin (APL v2) – http://wiki.jfrog.org/confluence/display/JP/JavaFX+Maven+Plugin
    When using this plugin with the pro version of Artifactory, you also get all jars auto-signed on the repository with a server side key-pair, and you can serve them from Artifactory with a dynamically generated JNLP that includes repository-URLs for all resources. There is a demo of this here: http://wiki.jfrog.org/confluence/display/RTF/WebStart+and+Jar+Signing

  2. I didn’t see a way that the JFrog plugin would let you point the jar resources directly to your repository when I tried it out; I see it can generate relative package-style URLs to the files within the codebase the same as the Codehaus plugin, e.g. <jar href="com/example/artifact/artifact-1.1.jar"/>, but what I was trying to accomplish was <jar href="http://repository/release/com/example/artifact/artifact-1.1.jar"/>. (The demo doesn’t show that either; I don’t think it’s actually allowed.)

    I’d be hesitant to rely on specific repository software for the signing and JNLP; I like the content of my artifacts to be consistent before deployment and thus independent of the retrieval mechanism. In the right situation I can see it being handy though.

  3. Just noticed a few instances where repository-specific paths slipped into the example; there’s nothing repository- or software-specific about the pattern, so I’ve excised them.

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