9.7: Pimped archetypes!

In the new WebManager 9.7 release, the archetypes have been pimped. The archetypes of 9.6 were based on the maven archetype plugin that has been significantly improved over the last year. Upgrading to this new plugin (which requires at least maven 2.0.7) opened up the door to many new features, like dynamic classnames and filenames. These new features allowed us to fix stuff that the archetypes previously caused to fail in the certification process, if the archetypes were used 'as-is'. But this is no more! In 9.7 you can generate your code from the archetypes and it will pass the certification process from scratch!

So what is new in 9.7?

• A new archetype 'webmanager-scheduledjob-archetype' has been introduced. This archetype creates a scheduled job, including session management, configuration management and scheduling stuff.
• Unit tests have been added to the archetypes
• The 'packagename' attribute has become obsolete. Since the group id and wcb id were already provided and the package name should equal <group id>.<wcb id> by convention, the archetype now makes it so!
• Several archetypes have been enhanced with features like property editors and validators
• Several guideline violations have been fixed, like missing or invalid JavaDoc, missing package.html files, missing api package, lines exceeding 120 characters and improper use of Java util logging.
• Some bugs have been fixed that were found later on in the archetypes, like the one described in Fuzzy issue 4 (see this article).
  
• WCA generation is now supported by default

How do I generate code from an archetype?

First of all, you will need Maven 2.0.7 in stead of Maven 2.0.6, which was the minimum requirement for 9.6 and earlier. Now there are some minor changes in the command that is used to generate WCBs from the archetype, this is the new syntax for generating a custom element:

mvn archetype:generate 
-DinteractiveMode=false
-DarchetypeGroupId=nl.gx.webmanager.archetypes 
-DarchetypeArtifactId=webmanager-element-archetype 
-DarchetypeVersion=9.7.0-SNAPSHOT 
-DgroupId=com.gxwebmanager.helloworld 
-DartifactId=helloworldelement
-Dclassprefix=HelloWorld 
-s ..\settings.xml

 The changes are displayed in bold:

• generate instead of create, which has been deprecated
• -DinteractiveMode=false, if set to true enables an interactive mode in which parameters can be entered one by one
• -Dclassprefix=HelloWorld, determines the prefix of the generated Java classes. So no more 'CustomElementController' and 'CustomElement', instead they will be named 'HelloWorldElementController' and 'HelloWorldElement' as they should.
  

What archetypes are available?

In 9.7, one new archetype has become available, which is the scheduled job. Below is an overview of alle archetypes available in 9.7.