THIS NEEDS REVISION AND CLEANING UP

Abstract

The Plugin Plugin needs to be refactored in order to support multiple mojo implementation languages. This document will detail the steps needed to add this functionality.

Current Status

The Plugin Plugin currently calls out to a set of generators in the maven-plugin-tools library, which in turn uses QDox to generate various things based on annotations in the java source code.

Refactored Design

The new design will have a generator-manager which is a component that the plugin mojos will lookup. This component will have access to a mapping of all generators and the language they're registered for. It'll iterate through the mappings, and extract mojo descriptors from all relevant scripts/sources using each language's registered generator. Results from each generator will be centrally aggregated by the generator-manager. After all generators have run, the generator-manager will call another class (depending on what it's meant to produce) to take all the aggregated mojo descriptors and produce a result (such as plugin.xml file for the project).