Deploy playn to Google App Engine

Question

I have worked my way through the Getting Started guide -- http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted -- but am stumped at the point "Running your new game on App Engine". The guide says "To run your game on Google App Engine, we can use the kindleit.net maven-gae-plugin." I have looked at http://www.kindleit.net/maven_gae_plugin/ but do not understand what I am supposed to do.

1) Can someone point me in the right direction regarding what I need to do to get/install the maven-gae-plugin. I assume this is a plugin for Maven but have no idea what to do?

Answer 1

To use the maven-gae-plugin in your project, you need to add the following to the repositories section of your pom.xml

<repository>
    <id>maven-gae-plugin-repo</id>
    <name>maven-gae-plugin repository</name>
    <url>http://maven-gae-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/repository</url>
</repository>

Add the following plugin in the build/plugins section of your pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>net.kindleit</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-gae-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>0.9.2</version>
  <configuration>
    <serverid>appengine.google.com</serverId>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Make sure the following is in your html/src/webapp/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">

  ...

  <!-- This is the unique id of your GAE application -->
  <application>my-unique-app-name</application>
  <!--  This variable is defined in your POM file -->
  <version>${gae.application.version}</version>

  ...

</appengine-web-app>

And add the following in your ~/.m2/settings.xml

<settings>
  ...
  <servers>
    <server>
      <id>appengine.google.com</id>
      <username>myname@gmail.com</username>
    </server>
  </servers>
  ...
</settings>

Then run mvn gae:deploy from your html folder in the PlayN project. Do note that this alone doesn't take care of the task of having DataNucleus enhance your domain objects if you have code that relys on using GAE's Datastore. That's an entirely different ball of wax there :)