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Mission

Cargo is a thin wrapper around existing containers (e.g. J2EE containers). It provides different APIs to easily manipulate containers.

Cargo provides the following APIs:

• A Java to start/stop/configure Java Containers and deploy modules into them. We also offer Ant tasks, Maven 1, Maven 2, Intellij IDEA and Netbeans plugins.
• A Java API to parse/create/merge J2EE Modules

Status

Version status (click in the status column to get release notes):

Architecture

Cargo offers differents ways of using it at different levels:

• Module Java API: A Java API to parse/create/merge J2EE Modules (WAR, EAR, etc)
• Container Java API: A Java API to start/stop/configure Java Containers and deploy modules into them.
• Generic Java API: A Java API that sits on top of the Container API but allows writing generic code that works with any container. It consists mostly in a set of Factory classes to instantiate Container API objects by name.
• Build plugins
  • Ant tasks: A set of Ant tasks that wrap the Generic Java API
  • Maven 1: A Maven 1 plugin that wraps the Ant tasks
  • Maven 2: A Maven 2 plugin
• IDE plugins
  • Netbeans
  • IntelliJ IDEA

The main Container API objects are:

• The Container is the top level interface wrapping a real physical container. Cargo supports local and remote containers. A Container is composed of a Configuration.
• A Configuration tells Cargo how the container is to be configured (whether it should create a standalone setup, whether it should be based on an existing configuration, etc). A Configuration can be configured to install Deployables before the Container is started.
• You can use a Deployer to deploy Deployables dynamically (i.e. after the Container is started).
• Deployables are archives to be deployed in the Container. They are WAR, EAR, etc.

Feature list

Some top-level features (the full feature list can be found here):

• Configuration — A Configuration specifies how the container is configured (logging, security, data sources, location where to put deployables, etc).
• Container — A top level interface wrapping a real physical container
• Debugging — Explain how to perform debugging when something doesn't work in Cargo
• Deployment — How to deploy components to a container
• Extensions — Extensions are additions to the Cargo core Java API such as build tool plugins, IDE plugins, etc
• Module API — API to manipulate J2EE archives, including vendor-specific deployment descriptors

Container support

List of supported containers and the extensions that are implemented for each container (Java API, Ant tasks and Maven2/Maven3 plugin). The specified version is the version of the associated Cargo module where the feature was first made available (for example 0.2 for the Maven2 plugin means version 0.2 of the Cargo Maven 2 extension release). Click on a container's name to see a detailed list of features it supports.

Some containers are tested dialy on the Codehaus Cargo Continous Integration System; for these the container's page also shows which version is tested.

Quick Start

The following examples demonstrate how to configure Resin 3.0.15 to start in target/resin3x and deploy a WAR located in path/to/simple.war using the Java API. The default port is 8080. Please note that the container.start() and container.stop() methods wait until the container is fully started and fully stopped before continuing. Thus, for any action you are executing after, you are assured the container is completely operational.

Static deployment

Static deployment means that the Deployable is deployed before the container is started. Here's an example using the strongly typed Java API:

Here's the same example using the generic untyped API (which we recommend as it leads to more generic code):

Hot deployment

Hot deployment means that the Deployable is deployed after the container is started.

Functional tests

For a detailed documentation on how to use Cargo for executing functional tests on a container, directly from your Java unit test classes (JUnit, TestNG, etc), read our Functional testing page.