Sencha SDK and Maven

[brian428]

I know it has already been touched on in the forums, but we really need a good way to integrate the SDK build process with Maven. This is really essential in larger enterprises where the build process is dictated down to the dev teams.

I know it's possible to install the SDK on a build server and execute it through a command line call, but a requirement like that isn't going to fly here. We need a standard way to run this without a dependency on installing additional software on the build server.

[ykey]

Does your organization leverage its own repository manager? Something like artifactory?

[brian428]

Yes, we use Nexus.

[frankbolviken]

Would be awesome if anybody wanted to help with this:
https://github.com/frankbolviken/MavExt

[brian428]

Even though I use Maven on a daily basis, I'm afraid I don't know much about it's inner workings or how one goes about creating a plugin. So I probably wouldn't be of much help myself, other than being able to offer help testing it.

That said, I think it's pretty discouraging that Sencha seems to be ignoring this gaping hole in its platform. They're marketing Ext JS and Sencha Touch as enterprise RIA tools that are on par with Flex, GWT, or JavaFX. But they offer no way to leverage their JavaScript platform in conjunction with Maven, which is by far the dominant enterprise build automation system.

This really needs to be addressed by Sencha. I can say from first-hand experience that upper management looks very dubiously at an "enterprise RIA platform" that doesn't support Maven. Especially when it's a commercial product.

[frankbolviken]

It seems fairly easy to create an maven plugin really.

The source files in the repo right now is actually a working plugin (dead simple tho).

And yeah, I really understand where you are coming from. I've experienced the same here, and I tought "hey.. this should not be that hard to create actually".

[brian428]

It seems to me that the really hard part will be coming up with a JAR to run the actual ExtJS/Touch build. Right now it's Windows-specific, as far as I can tell. Where I'm at, the build servers are Ubuntu, so somehow the Sencha portion of the build needs to be platform-agnostic. So I'm really not sure there's much we can do from the outside...it seems like this is something Sencha would need to create?