Google App Engine / Java and Maven

When first creating a project with the elipse google plugin, your presented with a project with gwt and gae/j ( google app engine / java) support. The first question I asked is how to get this all working with maven. The best archetype I have found is here gae-mvn-archetype. Instructions as followed:

1 create GAE/J project from maven archetype, artifactId is the app id.
> mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://www.mvnsearch.org/maven2
maven2
2 Build project
> mvn package
3 Test
> dev_appserver target\app-name
4 Deploy
> appcfg update target\app-name

But better to go here for specific details Maven for Google Appengine
Two things I've found from first use. First I was receiving ResourceDoesNotExistException: Unable to locate resource in repository. To get around this, in your settings.xml, usually found in /Users/.m2 .. there's a node called interactiveMode. Just comment this line out. As to the exact details I haven't looked into it yet. Second the META-INF directory is created in the resources directory. I would move this to the webapps, directory so the files jdoconfig.xml and persistence.xml are included in final build. Now in the google groups in the posting found here GAE/J Maven Support there's an alternative that doesn't rely on ant or google app engine SDK. I've tried this one out as well but found it to be not as easy to follow or use. I guess its a matter of what happens in the future on support and features, as to which one will be the better choice.

GWT support:
There were two maven plugins I found for this found here : gwt-maven google code and here : Google Web toolkit plugin. Long story short, the contributors from the google code hosted project will now be contributing to the Gwt plugin found on codehaus.org. So using this plugin Google Web toolkit plugin, should be good. The issues I've found is most of the documentation found on the site, refer to version 1.1. Using their plugin repository there was no 1.1 at the time of this post only 1.0 is found on there plugin repository So the solution is to use there sandbox repository found here Sandbox repository. Here you will be able to find the 1.1 release of GWT maven plugin.