Cool tip of the day: Maven & Eclipse ... importing projects

Today I attempted to import a project that had been written using MAVEN as its build process.
So I confidently when to the eclipse option to import existing maven projects ... all went well until I opened the project & tried to build it. when I saw this error:

Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration: org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-resources-plugin:2.4.3:resources (execution: default-resources, phase: process-resources)   pom.xml /test line 6    Maven Project Build Lifecycle Mapping Problem

This was not very welcome and the eclipse autofix options did not fix the issue.
So I turned to Slastdot & found a post (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7638562/import-maven-project-to-eclipse-and-fix-the-errors) but the top solution to to do a project update did not work.

So to fix it I followed a secondary solution (after deleting the .project file previously created) ...

1. Open the project folder in a command prompt;
2. run command mvn eclipse:eclipse
3. Open the project using eclipse;
4. Set project properties "configure-->Convert to Maven Project"

My experience is that this works nicely.... ALMOST!

The issue is that eclipse may not correctly pick up the maven dependencies.
This is because the .classpath file does not include values on the paths as  follows "<attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>".

This for a simple project means that you needs to convert your .classpath file from this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/test/java" output="target/test-classes" including="**/*.java"/>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/main/java" including="**/*.java"/>
  <classpathentry kind="output" path="target/classes"/>
  <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER"/>
  <classpathentry kind="var" path="M2_REPO/junit/junit/3.8.1/junit-3.8.1.jar"/>
</classpath>

to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/test/java" output="target/test-classes" including="**/*.java">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="optional" value="true"/>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/main/java" including="**/*.java">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="optional" value="true"/>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
  <classpathentry kind="output" path="target/classes"/>
      <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/JavaSE-1.6">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
      <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.m2e.MAVEN2_CLASSPATH_CONTAINER">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
</classpath>

Now this should pick up your MAVEN dependencies.

Other references:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2037188/how-to-configure-eclipse-build-path-to-use-maven-dependencies
2. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-ide-user/M9pMpZGD624

Cool tip of the day: Formatting source code for your blog

Oh finally!
I have pasted code into my blog & it has been a real pain to get it right.
While looking around I found a resource on blogspot http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.co.uk/ which provides an online utility to format the script into html to include on your blog.
It has two outputs, one with inline CSS and the other with a set of styles used.
The "linked style sheet" option depends on a PRE.source-code style.

An example of this formatting is as follows:

/**
 * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
 * simply prints "Hello World!" to standard output.
 */
class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string.
    }
}

A second resource can be found at http://codeformatter.blogspot.co.uk/ which has similar options  but allows you to define whether you have line numbers on your code. When you don't use embedded styles it creates a style element which defines two classes pre.CICodeFormatter and code.CICodeFormatter.

An example of this output is as follow:

1:  /**  
2:   * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that  
3:   * simply prints "Hello World!" to standard output.  
4:   */  
5:  class HelloWorldApp {  
6:    public static void main(String[] args) {  
7:      System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string.  
8:    }  
9:  }  

A third which I have yet to check is "How to use PrettyPrint to format source code in Blogger" which is a utility on blogger.com which is where this site is.
But more on this an other day.