Building a "Portal Application Archive" *.PAA using Maven

Question

We are looking to build multiple *.PAA files to deploy on IBM websphere 8.5.

I would love to use maven to consolidate our existing Portal *.war projects into a PAA file.

A PAA file is just like an EAR file - but with more structure in it. see here for specs: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYJ99_8.0.0/config/si_paa_spec.dita

Is this do-able ? or should I just use antscript ?

TIA.

Answer 1

Definately do-able. We have implemented a solution to do exactly this but for Portal 8.0.0.1, the solution has been used for managing 40+ war files, themes, jars, and other artifacts supported by the PAA.

These are the steps involved in creating our solution:

1. Create a new PAA manually without the WAR files (i.e. copy provided sample PAA, rename folders and property file, and edit sdd.xml files). Make sure to test this manual PAA by placing a test WAR file in it and make sure that it gets deployed.
2. Create a new simple maven pom project
3. Copy the PAA project (without WAR files) into src/main/resources (you could either add this as a resources directory or use the maven-resources-plugin to add them to the target dir)
4. Add all your WAR files and other artifacts as dependencies in your pom.xml files (we used classifiers to distinguished between normal WAR files and Portlet WAR files, but that does require the source projects to specify the classifier in their pom)
5. Use the maven-assembly-plugin's dependencySet feature to copy your dependencies in the specific location needed by the PAA. Use the fileSet feature to include the project PAA files copied earlier. Make sure that the assembly package.xml generates a zip file and does not include the base directory.

Sample dependencySet in package.xml (Note usage of classifier webapp for standalone WAR files)

    <dependencySet>
        <unpack>false</unpack>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
        <outputDirectory>myApp/components/MyApp/installableApps/war</outputDirectory>
        <outputFileNameMapping>${artifact.artifactId}.${artifact.extension}</outputFileNameMapping>
        <includes>
            <include>*:war:webapp</include>
        </includes>
    </dependencySet>
    <dependencySet>
        <unpack>false</unpack>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
        <outputDirectory>myApp/components/MyApp/installableApps/portlets</outputDirectory>
        <outputFileNameMapping>${artifact.artifactId}.${artifact.extension}</outputFileNameMapping>
        <includes>
            <include>*:war</include>
        </includes>
    </dependencySet>