Proposal: move .iml files to Maven files (pom.xml)

[tomascohen]

It would be beneficial for automated building and testing, to be able to build the Java libraries without the need of an specific IDE (InteliJ in this case).

According to the internet, it would be as hard as:

• Open your project in IntelliJ.
• Right-click on the project root and select Add Framework Support.
• Choose Maven and click OK.

It would generate the corresponding pom.xml files, and it would still be possible to build as usual from IntelliJ, but also from the command-line (github actions, Docker, etc).

I'm not sure how important removing the .jar files from the Git repo is, but it would make sense. This is what other Java projects do (I only know about DSpace).

[mdnoble73]

I like the idea of building these on demand. We will need to work out the process for how this works with the install process and the indexers will likely need to be stopped before they are built.

[kylemhall]

Optimally these would be built as release artifacts and bundled with the rest of the release. The current git-based method of installation doesn't lend itself to that but the docker images do. If we create a bash function to build all the jars it would function for both cases! We could then use that function in two scripts, one for stopping the indexers, building the fars, then restarting the indexers and also one that simply rebuilds the jars as part of the image build process.

[kylemhall]

I've downloaded and installed intelliJ and for the life of me I simply cannot even get the "Add Framework Support" option to show up. @mdnoble73 does that menu show for you? Does it contain Maven?

[kylemhall]

I was able to perform the "Add Framework Support" action. Doing it on the root directory generates a skeleton pom.xml Treating the koha_export dir as the project root yielded something more interesting: https://github.com/kylemhall/aspen-discovery/commit/3d4e263b1ccb0e6d6c2d936964c459be76b17b52

I'm not sure if either of these are useful yet.