Surefire/Failsafe maven plugin and SSL

I was puzzled today by an interesting feature introduced by the "surefire" and "failsafe" maven plugins (used for unit/integration test my components). These were introduced with their 2.1 release.  As I had components calling web services using 2-way SSL for authentication, I noticed that my test cases where failing when using maven via command line (mvn clean install). They worked on the IDE (Eclipse/STS) fine, but were not working on the command line. I saw the following error:

PKIX path building failed: ... unable to find valid certification path to requested target

 So it was clear that maven was not passing the SSL system properties from my .mavenrc file:


This is what I discovered as I read more the documentation.

Mavenizing a Flex Project with multiple artifacts

  I was asked to include a Flex project within the current build process in place (maven2 based). Now, I like maven for many reasons which I'm not going to explain in this entry, however I would like to say a bit about my experience with such a "mavenization" if you will. Most Flex projects I've been involved are developed either directly in Flex Builder (Fb3) and/or compile using an Ant task. Nothing wrong with this approach, however Maven encourages a convention that may not necessarily be embraced in a traditional Flex Application. I hope to explain what I mean by this in the next paragraphs.