Maven best practice in Aries development

Overall structure

The Aries project is a collection of loosely couple bundles, therefore it must be possible to build each bundle on its own. This implies:

1. A parent pom that isn't at the root of the SVN trunk.
2. Each bundle has enough pom info so that it can be released independently.
3. parent/default-parent has dependency management for basic osgi-dependencies that all projects are almost certain to use (this includes PAX dependencies for testing).
4. Each bundle has legal files in its checkout root.
5. Each bundle has an SCM element in its top level pom.
6. Bundles do not (except samples) have sub-modules.

Good practice in the pom

1. Alphabetic ordering in dependency management is helpful
2. Include a brief description of the project
3. Commenting in platform dependencies, see samples assembly projects.
4. Use ${project.version} not ${version} for Maven 3 compatibility.

Group and Artifact names

1. The Bundle Symbolic Name is explicitly set to the Maven artifactId. For projects which deliver bundles, the artifactID will therefore completely describe the jar and must begin org.apache.aries.{subproject}. For projects which do not deliver bundles (for example agregator projects) it is acceptable to use a short descriptive artifactID.
2. The group ID will overlap with the artifactId and will normally be of the form org.apache.aries.{subproject}