Teams whose builds depend on Maven and that use automation heavily typically end up in writing their own plugins for Maven. Although these plugins are often only released for internal use, developers who employ these plugins need to have access to proper documentation. Maven provides the Maven Plugin Plugin to create as much meaningful documentation automatically from the source code. While it is easy to add howtos and tutorials - which are typically not generated automatically - with the use of the Maven Site Plugin, having these documents as part of the Confluence collaboration platform often makes it easier to apply changes and add additional information off-sync with the plugin's release cycle. Having this information in Confluence also makes it easier for non-programmers to add valuable information.

To create a user documentation for a plugin for Maven the projectdoc for Maven Developers Add-on for the projectdoc Toolbox provides tools to import information from a Maven POM file. This way all properties specified by the developers are accessible as space properties by authors of the documentation.

This approach does require to create a Maven Site with all reports and to link to or transclude from this information. The Information Systems Extension provides macros to access information from remote servers.

Live Examples

 

Here are some examples using this tool set.

Buildmetadata	Generates build metadata and provides it as Maven build properties. The properties are written to a properties file that can be included in the generated artifact. The information can also be added to the manifest file.
Enterprise Architect	Integrates the Enterprise Architect (Sparx Systems) into a Maven build process. This allows to export diagrams to be used for documentation in other tools, such as projectdoc.
JBoss Modules	Generates an archive of modules to be copied to an JBoss 7 installation. The configuration is generated from the Maven POM with the help of a collection of generic and project-specific mapping rules.
Projectmetadata	Collects and packages metadata about the project and attaches the artifact containing this metadata to the build.