runtime-builder maven plugin

• Complexity:

  Intermediate

trygvis had an idea regarding a replacement for things like maven-execute-plugin in the sandbox...things that are leveraging m2 expressly for generation of classpaths and things like that.

basically model a plugin along the lines of the plexus-runtime-builder and generate shell (and batch file) stubs for calling classes with main methods..

this would be useful in automagically generating the launch scripts for servers or for the odd little command line tools that people have now and then.

I am thinking two modes, one that scans through a source base using qdox maybe and locates all of the classes that have main methods declared and create stubs for calling those applications...the other being configurable though the <configuration> of the plugin itself.

this could go a number of ways..one would be unique stubs generated for every commandline program, the other could be compressed into one that could be launched through a common run.sh or something.

the generated shell script would also contain the classpath required to launch the executable, making an additional invocation of m2 not required for execution of the main method.

a mode could also be provided to execute the artifact itself with -jar or something along those lines.

an similar implemention of the basic idea exists in continuum and is what is used to generate the plexus test runtime

this could either be a raw implementation of this idea or mapped on top of the existing plexus-runtime-builder...but this will likely take some refactoring of the plexus component to support this generalized need....not sure the extent required for this last option though...the plexus-runtime-build has a lot of material already built it including what appears to be support for stand alone applications and windows services.