4.4. Locating Artifacts in a Fabric

Fabric containers also use Maven to locate artifacts, however they do so in a more constrained manner than a standalone container. Fabric containers use Maven through the fabric's Maven proxy and never search the local repository of the system on which it is running.

The Maven proxy attempts to strike a similar balance between accessing artifacts locally and accessing artifacts from remote repositories, however it changes the scope of local and remote. For default features, the artifacts are always stored in the fabric's system repository which is maintained by the fabric's ensemble servers. For non-default features, third party bundles, or customer developed bundles, it is likely that Maven will need to search remote repositories that are outside of the fabric to locate the artifacts.

Figure 4.3, “How Containers Locate Artifacts in a Fabric” shows an overview of the procedure that a fabric container follows when a feature or bundle is installed.

The steps followed to locate the required Maven artifacts are:

Because fabric containers generally do not check a repository local to the machine on which it is running, you must load all of an application's artifacts into a repository that the fabric's Maven proxy knows about. There are two ways to do this: