JSPC Maven Plugin

This plugin precompiles JSPs. It is a fork of jetty-jspc-maven-plugin and configured as follows:

<build>
....
<plugin>
 <groupId>io.leonard.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>jspc-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>${ENTER_VERSION_HERE}</version>
   <executions>
    <execution>
     <id>jspc</id>
     <goals>
     <goal>compile</goal>
    </goals>
    <configuration>
    </configuration>
  </execution>
 </executions>
</plugin>
...
</build>

It has the following improvements compared to jetty-jspc-maven-plugin:

• Faster: can be configured to run multi-threaded. For a speed comparison read the blog post below.
• More descriptive error messages: Under Maven 3 this plugin shows a clear indication of what caused the error and which file it is in
• Not stop at the first error (depends plugin configuration)

The compiler used by default in this plugin is Apache Jasper 10.

If the Jasper compiler version needs to be overloaded, the plugin must be configured as follows:

<build>
  ....
  <plugin>
    <groupId>io.leonard.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>jspc-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${ENTER_VERSION_HERE}</version>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <id>jspc</id>
        <goals>
          <goal>compile</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration />
      </execution>
    </executions>
    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-jasper</artifactId>
        <version>${ENTER_JASPER_VERSION_HERE}</version>
        <exclusions>
          <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.jdt</groupId>
            <artifactId>ecj</artifactId>
          </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
      </dependency>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.eclipse.jdt</groupId>
        <artifactId>ecj</artifactId>
        <version>3.36.0</version>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </plugin>
  ...
</build>

Full documentation of the goal is available at https://leonardehrenfried.github.io/jspc-maven-plugin/compile-mojo.html

Compatibility Matrix

• 5.X version of jspc-maven-plugin : needs Java >= 17, Jasper only 11.X
• 4.X version of jspc-maven-plugin : needs Java >= 11, Jasper only 10.X
• 3.X version of jspc-maven-plugin : needs Java >= 1.8, Jasper only 9.X
• 2.X version of jspc-maven-plugin : needs Java >= 1.7, Jasper only 8.X
• 1.X version of jspc-maven-plugin : needs Java >= 1.5, Jasper only 6.X, 7.X

Comparison of precompiler plugins

https://tcollignon.github.io/2016/12/04/How-to-compile-JSP-with-Tomcat-and-Maven-faster.html

Use another JSP compiler

By default this plugin use org.apache.jasper.compiler.JDTCompiler (see compilerClass goal option). But if the number of threads is over 2, this compiler has too much synchronization overheas and hence is no very not very performant.

To improve this is possible to user another compilerClass org.apache.jasper.compiler.ParallelJDTCompiler, which reduces synchronization.

Note : With Tomcat 9 the compiler org.apache.jasper.compiler.ParallelJDTCompiler will not work very well. It needs some fix. We advice to use the standard org.apache.jasper.compiler.JDTCompiler instead.

Release process

1. make release
2. make commit-site