Had one of those Maven/Eclipse experiences that was so infuriating, I need to record it here to make sure I can fix it easily next time.
Using STS 2.9.1 I created a “Dynamic Web Module” project. For the runtime I targeted tc Server / Tomcat 6. Then I proceeded to do some rudimentary JSP stuff, only to find that the JSTL taglibs were not resolving. It seems the expectation is that these would be provided by the container. Under JBoss they probably would be, but not under Tomcat. (I guess it makes sense… if you have multiple apps in the container, just let each one bundle the version desired – fewer container dependencies).
Fine; so I added the maven nature and the jstl.jar dependency. At some point I did Maven > Update project configuration. Suddenly the class that I had defined to back a form is not found. Also I’m getting this really annoying project error:
Dynamic Web Module 3.0 requires Java 1.6 or newer. [...] Maven WTP Configuration Problem One or more constraints have not been satisfied.
WTF? Of course STS/Eclipse are configured to use Java 1.6… but my project apparently isn’t. So I go change that, but it doesn’t fix that error, and any time I update project config with Maven, it’s back to using JRE 1.5 and my Java source files are no longer on the build path as source files.
Turns out (took longer to find than to tell about it) the Maven compiler plugin doesn’t use Eclipse settings and just imposes its own defaults, i.e. Java 5, unless otherwise configured by a POM. And since a “Dynamic Web Project” uses Servlet 3.0 it requires Java 6. Boom.
Easy to fix, though annoying that I have to and there isn’t some Eclipse setting for this. Just add under the top-level POM:
<build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> <configuration> <source>1.6</source> <target>1.6</target> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> </build>
(Cripes, WordPress, can I get a “code” formatting/paste option already?? “Preformatted” most certainly isn’t.)
Then have Maven update project config again and 1.6 is in play. Oh, and instead of using the “src” directory for my source, I went ahead and changed to src/main/java as Maven expects, so that future “config update” will pick that up.
