Public and war folders in the maven project layout (tbroyer plugin)?

[Bruno Salmon]

Hi,

The GWT documentation describes the project layout using Eclipse, but I have a couple of questions when transposing it into the maven project layout (using the tbroyer plugin):

- where is the public folder located in the maven project layout? I tried different places (such as src/public, src/main/public, src/main/resources/public) but it was never found by the compiler

- where can I put my host page and other html/css sources files? The documentation talks about the war folder, but this directory seems to be the webappDirectory in the tbroyer plugn, so it's a an output directory under the target folder which is not a good place for sources files (they are erased with maven clean).

Thanks

[Thomas Broyer]

On Thursday, September 1, 2016 at 11:33:53 AM UTC+2, Bruno Salmon wrote:

Hi,

The GWT documentation describes the project layout using Eclipse, but I have a couple of questions when transposing it into the maven project layout (using the tbroyer plugin):

- where is the public folder located in the maven project layout? I tried different places (such as src/public, src/main/public, src/main/resources/public) but it was never found by the compiler

The 'public' folder always comes as a subpackage of where your *.gwt.xml lives. So if your module is com.example.testapp.TestApp (ultimately a com/example/testapp/TestApp.gwt.xml file in the classpath), your public folder would be (using the default convention) com/example/testapp/public. You could technically put it either in src/main/java or src/main/resources, though src/main/resources would be preferred in a gwt-app or gwt-lib project.

 

- where can I put my host page and other html/css sources files? The documentation talks about the war folder, but this directory seems to be the webappDirectory in the tbroyer plugn, so it's a an output directory under the target folder which is not a good place for sources files (they are erased with maven clean).

The 'war folder' is used as both input (for static assets and your WEB-INF/ folder) and output (where GWT will write the compilation output), but Maven (and many other build tools) have a clear/clean separation of input(source) and output(target) folders.

It's impossible to accurately answer your questions, because it depends what you're building and how you build it.

If you're building a webapp with a server part, then use the src/main/webapp from your server/webapp Maven module (you use distinct modules for client and server parts, right?); in other words, the host page is part of your webapp, not your GWT app. See https://github.com/tbroyer/gwt-maven-archetypes

If you build a standalone client application, then use the 'public path' in a gwt-app Maven module; that way the WAR/ZIP file created by your build will include both the JS output from GWT and your static assets, actually copied there by the GWT compiler. (You could also use the resources:copy-resources in the prepare-package phase to copy from, say, src/main/webapp to the target folder, but running your app in development mode would be a bit more complicated).