Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Running the Program from a Custom Goal

Now that you've generated the client library, use Maven to execute the mdn.weather.Weather class and obtain the weather report for Chicago, Illinois.

How do I do that?

Define a custom goal in maven.xml that uses Ant's java task to execute the mdn.weather.Weather class:

<goal name="weather:run" prereqs="jar">
    
  <ant:java classname="mdn.weather.Weather" fork="true">
    <ant:arg value="41.30"/>
    <ant:arg value="-87.51"/>
    <ant:arg value="1"/>
    <ant:classpath>
      <ant:pathelement 
          location="${maven.build.dir}/${maven.final.name}.jar"/>            
      <ant:pathelement 
           location="${pom.getDependencyPath('commons-discovery:commons-discovery')}"/>
      <ant:pathelement 
          location="${pom.getDependencyPath('commons-logging:commons-logging')}"/>
      <ant:pathelement location="${pom.getDependencyPath('axis:axis')}"/>
      <ant:pathelement 
          location="${pom.getDependencyPath('axis:axis-jaxrpc')}"/>
      <ant:pathelement location="${pom.getDependencyPath('axis:axis-saaj')}"/>
      <ant:pathelement location="${pom.getDependencyPath('axis:axis-wsdl4j')}"/>
    </ant:classpath>
  </ant:java>
  
</goal>

The Weather class takes three arguments—latitude, longitude, and number of forecast days. In this goal, we've specified the coordinates for Chicago and a single day. When we execute the maven weather:run goal we get the response in the form of an XML document containing our forecast:

<?xml version='1.0' ?> <dwml version='1.0' xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> // ...