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To get the development environment working the plugin also requires access to the unzipped SDK as packaged by Google. The plugin tries to help you set this up (“gae:unpack”) but that failed for me. I was able to get stuff working by manually unzipping the SDK artifact downloaded directly from Google to the following directory: ~/.m2/repository/com/google/appengine/appengine-java-sdk/1.3.0/appengine-java-sdk-1.3.0

You’ll also notice in our appengine-web.xml that we substitute in our application name. By default this comes from the properties section of the pom.xml file (line 11).

3. Adds a new gae:start goal. This is identical to gae:run, except that it does not automatically execute the package phase before starting the server. The intent is to use this in a project POM, but it can also be used to start the server quickly when you don't want to rebuild the project. Right now I just copied the RunGoal completely, except for the '@execute phase="package"' declaration, because I didn't want to introduce conflicts in case someone else is editing RunGoal.java. A better thing to do in the future would be to have RunGoal extend StartGoal with an empty class that just adds the '@execute phase="package"' annotation (it can't be the other way around, with StartGoal extending Run goal, because there's no way to override a mojo with an @execute annotation with one that doesn't have it---it gets inherited automatically).

The idea behind all of these changes is to make it so that you can use the maven-gae-plugin in a project's POM for automated integration tests. The gae:start goal automatically binds to the pre-integration-test phase by default, and the gae:stop goal binds to post-integration-test. This is most useful when combined with something like the maven-failsafe-plugin and a functional testing library like HtmlUnit that you can use to simulate web requests. It would also be useful for Selenium testing.