[aether-users] Using Aether for classpath management

[Alexander Pokahr <pokahr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I recently discovered Aether and wonder how I can make the best use of it.
My scenario is the following: In a component runtime I want to automatically
add dependencies to the classpath, when a component artifact is added.
Artifacts may be in remote repositories, only in the local repository or
even only in the workspace (e.g. in when building a multi-module maven 
project
on the local hard disk).

I made some progress and obtained promising initial results.
Yet, I'm currently lost with respect to several issues:

1. I want to make use of the existing maven infrastructure (e.g. 
settings.xml
and information from the POMs). Is there a clean way to obtain such settings
in the way maven does it? The Aether demo only uses hard-coded information
(e.g. local and remote repository locations)...

2. I typically start from a POM loaded via the ModelBuilder (e.g. as 
found in a
JAR file that has been added to the component runtime by some user).
This requires lots of mappings between Aether classes and Maven classes 
(e.g.
org.sonatype.aether.graph.Dependency vs. org.apache.maven.model.Dependency).
I found some private conversion code in DefaultArtifactDescriptorReader 
from package
org.apache.maven.repository.internal. Does this mean that there is no 
public API
available for this purpose and I have to re-implement the conversion myself?

3. Is there a way that I can tweak Aether to work on artifacts in a 
workspace
instead of a local or remote repository?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Alex