The Fornax Workflow plugin is a Maven Plugin that executes MWE/MWE2 workflows within Maven. It has been there for quite some years now, and whoever needed to integrate MWE/MWE2 workflows in a headless build was likely using it. The Fornax Platform has been an address where components around openArchitectureWare, Xpand and Xtext have been developed. While all other subprojects don’t play any role anymore, the Workflow plugin is still in frequent use.
Over the years we had to change the underlying infrastructure some times. The plugin was hosted on the project’s own repository server, and projects using the plugin had to configure an additional plugin repository either in their POMs or settings.xml. This was undesired, but at the end not really a blocker. However, with a recent change of the repository manager, users experienced problems accessing the Fornax repository http://www.fornax-platform.org/nexus/content/groups/public. Currently, this URL is redirected to a server hosted at itemis, and users might get problems with the HTTPS connection.
It always bothered me that we had to host this plugin on a separate repository, and since it is a widely used component, it is logical that it should be available from the Central repository. But it was never a blocker for me. Now finally I got the driver to change this.
Long story short, the plugin is now published at Maven Central as version 3.5.1. I highly recommend to upgrade to this version and remove the Fornax Maven repository from your configuration. The coordinates did not change, they are still org.fornax.toolsupport:fornax-oaw-m2-plugin. I would like to change this sometime in the future (e.g. the name parts “oaw” and “m2” are not up-to-date anymore), maybe with moving development to another project hosting platform.
Version 3.5.1 does not differ much from 3.4.0, which is the version likely used by the world today. The main work was on refactoring the POM and its parent in order to meet the requirements for deployment on Maven Central. Further, I worked on automation of the release process with the maven-release-plugin.
There is one additional feature in 3.5.x: The new property useTestScope can be used to skip dependencies from the test scope for computation of the Java classpath used to execute a workflow in forked mode. On Windows systems the classpath sometimes reaches the limit of allowed command line length, especially since the local Maven repository is below the user’s home directory by default, which has already a rather long path prefix. By default, the plugin will exclude now these test scope dependencies unless the user configures the property explicitly. In 3.5.0 there was a small logical bug with this feature which made the plugin unusable, so please do not use that version. The version 3.5.1 can be used without problems for all using 3.4.0 so far.
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