parent-updates-maven-plugin

I've had the privilege of working with Apache Maven (official site) in most of my projects almost since its official release in 2005. Maven is so much more than a build automation tool - providing dependency resolution, project configurations, and automatically-generated project reports / web sites, just to name a few features. It isn't often that I find something that I can't accomplish with Maven - but hopefully this is my chance to make a slight contribution back to the project.

One of the many plugins I've been using for a while now is the versions-maven-plugin - specifically to find and report upon any available dependencies (artifacts used by a project), as well as plugins (artifacts used by the Maven build for the project). There are goals to display the results of these update checks during the build - see "Checking for new dependency updates" and "Checking for new plugin updates". The plugin also provides even further detailed report pages. For examples of these, see one of the plugin's own reports - which shows available dependency updates for the plugin itself when it was last built: "Dependency Updates Report".

However, one notable omission seems to be a goal to display any available updates to the parent POM (parent project) - which isn't reported as part of either the available dependencies or plugins. I had reported this as a feature request back in March as MVERSIONS-181: Versions Plugin should have a "display-parent-updates" goal:

Similar to how we have "display-dependency-updates", "display-plugin-updates", and "display-property-updates" goals, there should also be a "display-parent-updates" goal.

For example, we have a corporate root POM. This POM already runs "display-dependency-updates" and "display-plugin-updates" as part of its and all child builds. However, if the root POM is updated, any child builds aren't reporting that an updated parent POM is available. I believe that a "display-parent-updates" goal would help with this.

There is already the "update-parent" goal - but there isn't any equivalent "report/display only" functionality.

Unfortunately, since then and as of this writing, the request hasn't seen any activity. In the spirit of open source, I decided to see what it would take to implement this myself. The result is my own Maven plugin that adds "display-parent-updates" and "parent-updates-report" goals.

Shown below are the results of these efforts, as demonstrated against a small set of mock test projects. Each test project was chosen to go against a different parent. Choosing 2 versions of the Apache Maven project itself as parent examples seemed appropriate - and produced good results for demonstration purposes. I also included my own parent project - which had no parent updates available at the time, and a very simple project that doesn't even use a parent project. Click through the provided links, and observe the console output, as well as the generated report for each example. Note that the report template changes between projects, as the theme can be controlled by the parent project:

maven-3.0 | maven-RELEASE | MarkUtils-RELEASE | no-parent

[INFO] --- parent-updates-maven-plugin:2012.08.08:display-parent-updates (default) @ maven-3.0 ---
[INFO] 
[WARNING] The parent project has a newer version:
[WARNING]   org.apache.maven:maven .................................. 3.0 -> 3.0.4
[WARNING] The parent project has a newer version:
[WARNING]   org.apache.maven:maven-parent ............................... 15 -> 21
[WARNING] The parent project has a newer version:
[WARNING]   org.apache:apache ............................................ 6 -> 11

[INFO] --- parent-updates-maven-plugin:2012.08.08:display-parent-updates (default) @ maven-RELEASE ---
[INFO] 
[INFO] The parent project is the newest version:
[INFO]   org.apache.maven:maven ......................................... 3.0.4
[INFO] The parent project is the newest version:
[INFO]   org.apache.maven:maven-parent ..................................... 21
[WARNING] The parent project has a newer version:
[WARNING]   org.apache:apache ........................................... 10 -> 11

[INFO] --- parent-updates-maven-plugin:2012.08.08:display-parent-updates (default) @ MarkUtils-RELEASE ---
[INFO] 
[INFO] artifact com.ziesemer.utils:com.ziesemer.utils.pom: checking for updates from central
[INFO] The parent project is the newest version:
[INFO]   com.ziesemer.utils:com.ziesemer.utils.pom ................. 2011.08.05

[INFO] --- parent-updates-maven-plugin:2012.08.08:display-parent-updates (default) @ no-parent ---
[INFO] Project does not have a parent

The sources for these mock test projects are checked-in and distributed with the plugin sources, as the best alternative to proper automated testing that I was able to put together for this project. I had hoped to include a proper suite of JUnit tests - but only found disappointment in the current state of available testing frameworks for Maven plugins - some details of which are covered at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Review+of+Plugin+Testing+Strategies.

Implementation notes: This plugin actually extends the org.codehaus.mojo.versions.DisplayDependencyUpdatesMojo, DependencyUpdatesReport, and AbstractVersionsReportRenderer classes from versions-maven-plugin. For the display and report goals, I would have liked to have just extended their parent classes - AbstractVersionsUpdaterMojo and AbstractVersionsReport, respectively. However, due to the issues described at MPLUGIN-164, the Javadoc annotations are not visible across projects, causing fields on the parent classes to not be set - resulting in NullPointerExceptions, etc. The work-around I'm using is to use the maven-inherit-plugin. Unfortunately, it only support extending the classes actually bound to goals - and not their parent classes. Fortunately, the goals I'm extending were written such that I could access and override the methods needed to achieve the desired functionality. The only real side-effect of this is that there are some extra configuration options that are exposed from the goals I'm extending, that don't serve any purpose or have any impact on the goals I implemented. As the base versions-maven-plugin maintains compatibility with Java 1.4, I ensured that my parent-updates-maven-plugin does so as well. However, hopefully once everyone can agree to drop support for Java 1.4 and have a minimum Java version requirement of 1.5, proper Java 5 (non-Javadoc) annotations can be used to eliminate these issues, as detailed at MPLUGIN-189.

My intent for this release is to provide a temporary work-around for this missing functionality. I hope that my efforts may be included in a future version of the proper versions-maven-plugin - which would also eliminate some of the issues I noted above.

parent-updates-maven-plugin is available on ziesemer.java.net. It is released with a dual license - GNU GPL v3, as well as The Apache Software License, Version 2.0 - to match the base versions-maven-plugin that this project extends. Download the parent-updates-maven-plugin-*-dist.zip distribution from here. Please report any bugs or feature requests on the java.net Issue Tracker.