Developing a web application

The aim here is to combine the usage of the cassandra-maven-plugin with the jetty-maven-plugin to make development testing of the web application a lot easier. The developer does not have to manually install either Apache Cassandra or a Servlet container.

Note: the following examples assume you have put a reference to both cassandra-maven-plugin and jetty-maven-plugin into your pom.xml, e.g. for cassandra-maven-plugin you would add the following:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    ...
    <plugins>
      ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>cassandra-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>4.1.10.0</version>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
    ...
  </build>
  ...
</project>

If you cannot modify the pom.xml then you may have to specify the full coordinates for the goals, i.e. in stead of calling cassandra:start you would have to call org.codehaus.mojo:cassandra-maven-plugin:4.1.10.0:start unless you are happy using the latest version of the plugin.

From the command line, we can get almost all that we want from a simple

mvn cassandra:start jetty:run

If the web application is expecting keyspaces to be defined, we can use a CQL script to create the keyspaces for us. We create a file called src/cassandra/cql/load.cql. By default cassandra:start will run this script if the cassandra instance has not been created yet. If the automatic detection does not work for you, you can invoke cassandra:load manually.

mvn cassandra:start cassandra:load jetty:run

Thereafter we can skip the cassandra:load unless we run mvn clean and the automatic detection does not work again.

If we actually want to wipe all the data between Maven runs, we would use:

mvn cassandra:delete cassandra:start jetty:run

if relying on the auto-detection, otherwise we would use

mvn cassandra:delete cassandra:start cassandra:load jetty:run