Creating a Struts 2 Project Using Maven on Tomcat With IntelliJ IDEA

This post describes how to create a Java project using Struts 2 as the web framework, Maven as the build system to automatically deploy to Tomcat using IntelliJ IDEA 10 as the IDE.

Setting up Maven:

• Download the latest version of Maven from http://maven.apache.org/download.html.
• Install Maven by following the instructions at http://maven.apache.org/download.html#Installation.

Creating a Blank Struts 2 Project Using Maven

• Change directory to the directory you want the project created in.
• mvn archetype:generate -B -DgroupId=com.mycompany.myapp -DartifactId=my-app -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.struts -DarchetypeArtifactId=struts2-archetype-blank -DarchetypeVersion=<struts version ex. 2.2.3>

Creating the IDEA Project

• File->New Project
• Select the option "Create Java project from existing sources".  Then click "Next"
• Enter a name and location for your project.  Then click "Next" 
• Select "Do not create source directory" as the source directory was already created by Maven.
• Click "Next" twice, then "Finish".

Associate Maven Project with IDEA

• Go to"Maven" in the IDEA preferences.
• For the Maven home directory value enter the location where you installed Maven ex. /usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-3.0.3
• Click "Maven Projects" on the right side of the IDE.
• Click  the "+" button to add a new Maven project.
• Select the pom.xml that was created by Maven.

Add Struts and Dependencies Libraries

• In IDEA go to the "Project Structure" menu item, click "Libraries" under "Project Settings".
• Click the button "Attach Classes from Repository".
• Enter org.apache.struts:struts-core:<struts version> ex. org.apache.struts:struts-core:2.2.3
• Click "OK".
• This will add the libraries to a lib folder in your IDEA project.

Add the Mojo Tomcat Deployment Plugin to the pom.xml

• Add the following code snippet to the plugins section of the pom.xml.
•             <plugin>
                  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                  <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                  <version>1.1</version>
                  <configuration>
                      <url>http://localhost:8080/manager/html</url>
                      <warFile>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}.war</warFile>
                      <server>tomcat-localhost</server>
                  </configuration>
              </plugin>
• Note that the url and server values may need to be updated to reflect your installation.
• In the Maven settings.xml add the following snippet to the "servers" section.
•     <server>
        <id>tomcat-localhost</id>
        <username>username</username>
        <password>password</password>
      </server>
• Note that the id must match the server name in the pom.xml and the username/password must be for the user that has the role "manager-gui".
• To deploy to tomcat, in IDEA under the "Maven Projects" tab you should now see tomcat under "Plugins".  There you can select "tomcat:deploy" or "tomcat:redeploy" to deploy your application.

Drawing in CAShapeLayer versus CALayer

When drawing in a CAShapeLayer you can have a frame that has a width and height of 1 and drawing in the layer outside the frame and bounds will work as long as maskToBounds is not set to YES which is the default.  However, in a CALayer Quartz can only draw within the frame and bounds of the layer.  Stumbled across this when trying to create layers as small as possible to reduce memory usage and noticed that CAShapeLayer's rendered while CALayers did not render a drawing along the same path.