Using the Cross Platform Launcher Plugin

The ideal module structure for your project would have several modules:

• a parent module to define overall build/plugin settings
• your main application code in one module (e.g. my-app-code)
• any platform-specific code (e.g. OS-specific menu/look & feel initialisation) in separate modules per OS (e.g. my-app-windows, my-app-macosx, my-app-kde, my-app-gnome)
• a launcher module for each platform - note that this plugin builds the launcher structure to contain a module's dependencies, and not any code that is produced in that module, so it is advised to separate the platform-specific code (see previous section) into a module on its own, and have a parallel launcher module per platform (e.g. my-app-windows-launcher, my-app-macosx-launcher, my-app-kde-launcher, my-app-gnome-launcher)
• you may then add platform-specific packaging to these launcher modules (.msi, .dmg, .deb/.rpm as appropriate)

To use the Cross Platform Launcher Plugin in Maven 2, you simply need to:

• provide platform-specific files in your src/main/resources directory, e.g. a .icns icon file for Mac OS X.
• configure the Plugin in your project's pom.xml. See the index of examples for examples of this.
• optionally configure an archive stage using the Maven Assembly Plugin, using a platform-specific assembly descriptor provided by this plugin
• run "mvn package" on your project.
• the resulting launcher directory structure is created under the target/macosx, target/windows or target/linux directory
• if you added the archive stage, the archive of the launcher structure (.zip on Windows; .tar.gz on Mac OS X and Linux) is created in your target directory.