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Maven Multi-Module Project Structure

Asked 2013-06-17T11:44:12.537
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I'm building a distributed application that is based off of a front-end (read: web-facing) HTTP API which calls into underlying (read: non-web-facing) Thrift Services.

As an example, I may have:

  • authentication-service (contains the code for authentication)
  • core-service (contains generated thrift sources and some common classes such as service discovery and initialization logic)

All of the individual services depend on core-services, as does the HTTP web-facing API. I have this as a multi-module project right now, but I would like each to be separate (and tracked in their own repositories - though I know I could still do this with a multi module build).

tl;dr -

Is it a common build practice to have a module (core-service) which is individually built and then pushed to a maven repo (and then included as a jar in the other projects), or would it be better in this case to do a multi-module project?

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In principle it is always better to have your projects evolve as independently as possible. However this is more an organizational issue rather than a technical one. When all is said and done your project structure should be consistent with your organization.

This boils down to keeping projects separate and have depending projects manage dependencies by means of a local repository manager if they are either maintained by different people or it makes sense to release them at different times. Otherwise you're probably better off with a multi-module project structure.

In our project we went for a sort of an in-between choice: we do have a multi-module structure, but all the projects reside in independent Subversion repositories, so that they can be branched separately, and we use the aggregator project to choose how to mix and match projects from different branches by means of svn:externals in order to create customized releases for specific customers.

The downside is that maintaining a similar structure is complicated and time-consuming. We have developed a significant amount of scripts to partly automate these tasks. This is particularly burdensome because the Maven release plugin is not capable of dealing with modules hooked by means of Subversion externals.

answered 2013-06-17T12:03:33.447

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