Last installment we looked at building Flex with Maven and Ant, and now we'll look at the development lifecycle so far. Then, in preparation for next installment, we'll look at the dependencies for the persistence layer.

Now that we have tasks to help us and we’ve hooked into a few points in the Maven build process, let’s discuss making changes and reviewing those changes through the web browser in our development environment.

Let’s look at it from this point of view (see Table 4). What type of resource changed, and what needs to happen for us to see the changes? The “Build” column in the table tells what command to run and from what project to run it to compile, build, or otherwise make the changes “stick.”

The “Deploy” column tells which command from which project will push the changes to the local development environment so that we can see the changes.

For example, Figure 9 shows the output of load-schema in the bookie-data project.

Figure 9. Output of load-schema in bookie-data project

Building the Persistence Layer: Maven Configuration

We’ve already gone over the bulk of the POM file and its interaction with Ant. All that’s left is to look at the dependencies:

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
           <groupId>microcontainer.jboss.ejb3</groupId>
           <artifactId>hibernate-all</artifactId>
           <version>rc9</version>
           <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    ...
    </dependencies>

I’m not going to put the whole dependency list in here, but there are a few points to hit. Notice how a dependency uses the same “big three” identifiers that all projects need to define: groupId, artifactId, and version. This is enough information for Maven to uniquely pick out a dependency.<scope>, the next tag under the big three, tells Maven when the project needs the dependency. Table 5 lists the full explanation of scope from Maven’s web site.

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You can also mark a dependency true if there isn’t a hard requirement for it. For instance, some logging packages will make use of some dependencies if they’re found, but won’t use them if they’re not found.

Remember that you can build the bookie-data’s persistence unit JAR by typing `mvn package` on the command line inside the root of the bookie-data project.

Next installment we're going to look at the code that makes up the persistence layer of our sample application, both the Java and ActionScript code. You can always find the entire series here.