== Maven Repository ==

The BRICCS Maven repository is currently (December 2010) a Maven2 repository.[[BR]]

The repository is important because it gives access to already built BRICCS artifacts. That is, a development environment is '''not''' required in order to build an artifact before deploying it in a live or test environment (eg: within Tomcat or JBoss); rather, an already built and versioned artifact should be available from the maven repository.[[BR]]

Over time the repository may also give access to third party artifacts (acting as a mirror for other publicly available repositories), but that is not the case at present.

=== Ideas for a Naming Standard ===
We need to differentiate between:
 * Artifacts which have gone live; ie: the source is tagged within SVN. These could be historical as well as currently live versions. 
 * Artifacts built from source at the trunk within SVN; ie: developed but not deployed in a live environment yet.

The first of these is of prime importance: it represents official, released versions. The second is only there for developers to share for development or integration purposes.

Some organizations run two repositories to differentiate these levels. This seems a little too much for the level of BRICCS development at present, so I '''suggest''':
 * Artifacts built from tagged versions within SVN (ie: official releases) should have the standard version numbering system. 
 * Artifacts built from the trunk (but not yet released as official versions) should have SNAPSHOT within the name.

For instance, the unique id generator might have releases briccs-uidgen-1.0.jar and briccs-uidgen-1.0.1.jar, whereas the very latest source would (if it has been deployed within maven) have an unreleased artifact of briccs-uidgen-n.n.n-SNAPSHOT.jar where n.n.n is somewhere near the proposed next version number for a release.

=== Just a Note ===
The above seems sensible to me and in the spirit of Maven examples. But it is not how the Obiba repository is structured, where SNAPSHOT seems to be used as a sort of indication of tagging. But I find the Obiba way confusing. 

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Comments

I agree with pretty much all of this.
However, I would like to add a timestamp to the SNAPSHOT builds.
If we are working on fixing a bug, we may want to have several versions of a development branch available in our repository.

So for snapshot builds, I would extend what you have to add a timestamp briccs-uidgen-n.n.n-SNAPSHOT-yyymmddHHMMSS.jar

-- DaveMorris

Whoops! Back to the drawing board. Shows my lack of knowledge of Maven 2...

I have found that if you include SNAPSHOT in the version number, eg: foo-1.0.2-SNAPSHOT, a deploy generates a suitable directory structure but the actual artifact name '''does not have''' SNAPSHOT in the name, although it '''is''' timestamped!

For example, something like this gets generated within the maven repo:[[BR]]
/.../foo-1.0.2-SNAPSHOT/foo-1.0.2-20101209.090901-1.war

Actually, this looks acceptable to me. It means a snapshot will be recognizable from the inclusion of a timestamp. There should be few of these given that the official releases would be tagged versions within SVN. The official releases would '''not''' have a timestamp.

-- JeffLusted