Highlights of this video demonstration:

Browsing Repository Archives

The Archive Browser Plugin will allow you to browse the contents of any JAR, WAR, EAR or ZIP file in the Nexus UI (or over REST if you so desire).  You can now view the contents of source JARs, view html documentation stored in javadoc JARs, or browse the contents of the archives, to validate contents.

To browse the contents of an archive in a Nexus repository, click on Browse Storage and then click on an archive.  When browsing the contents of your repositories, you will find that clicking on a file of the proper type (currently just .jar, .war, .ear or .zip files) will bring up a new panel which shows the contents of an archive.

Clicking on a file in the archive browsing interface will cause Nexus to serve this file to your browser.   If you are reading a file that your browser can display (like an image or a text file), the file will be displayed by your browser; otherwise, you will be prompted to download the file to your workstation.   You can use this functionality to…

…Browse Java Source

You can use this archive browsing functionality to browse source code contained in Source JARs.    The following figure shows you what you would see, if you wanted to load the CopyUtils.java file from commons-io version 1.3.2.   Because commons-io 1.3.2 has an available sources JAR artifact, you can browse the source.

If you are looking for the source of a specific class, you can search for artifacts by class name in the Nexus search interface.   Once you’ve located the artifact that has a specific class with Nexus Search, you can download the artifact from the remote repository, browse storage, and view the source of the class within Nexus.

(Alternatively, if you installed m2eclipse, an Eclipse plugin which can read the Nexus index and interact with Maven repositories, you can simply expand a dependency JAR on the Maven classpath and double-click on a particular class.   If you need to browse source from Eclipse, you should consider installing m2eclipse.  There is no easier way to browse source.)

Viewing Javadocs

I imagine that the most useful portion of this new set of features is the ability to view javadocs.  We have created a shortcut which is available on files named (filename)-javadoc.jar.  Simply right click on the file, and you are given a context menu, with a new option ‘View Javadoc’.  This will open a new browser window that will be directed to the index.html in the root of the jar file.    From this index.html you can click on HTML links and the resulting pages are all served from Nexus.

Although viewing javadocs and sources jars is probably the main point of this plugin, it is generic enough that you can view contents of any jar/war/ear/zip file, for whatever purposes you require.  Make sure your webapp bundle has the proper libraries in it, validate that a jar file contains the class files you think it should, and anything else you can dream up.

Javadoc and Archive Browsing Permissions

There is also a new privilege tied to this functionality, should you only want certain users to be able to use this feature.  You can control access to these archiving browsing options by granting and revoking the “Browse Archive Files (read)” permission shown in the following figure.

That’s all for now from Nexus, just making the little things in development life easier.   To get started, download a free evaluation of Nexus Professional 1.5.0 .

Downloading Nexus 1.5.0

If you are already using Nexus, it is easy to upgrade.   Download the distribution, unpack it next to your sonatype-work/ directory – that’s all it takes to upgrade.   If you haven’t installed Nexus yet, download a distribution, unpack it, and run the appropriate script under ${nexus_home}/bin/jsw.   If you are not yet using a repository manager, now’s the time.

• Download Nexus Open Source 1.5.0
• Download Nexus Professional 1.5.0

The rest of this post provides an overview of some of the release highlights.

Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Highlights

For more details, see the Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Release Notes.

LDAP Integration in Nexus OSS: The existing Professional LDAP plugin has been moved to the OSS code base, and is now available with the OSS release (there is a new Professional plugin that greatly enhances functionality as well).

Remote Repository Browsing: We have integrated the Remote Repository Browser plugin as well, this plugin was contributed by Anders Hammar, and allows browsing of remote proxy repositories. This feature is especially handy if you are working with remote repositories hosted on Amazon’s S3 service (such as the SpringSource repository). Since it isn’t possible to browse an S3-based repository in a web browser, you can use the remote repository browsing tab to directly inspect the contents of a remote repository with the Nexus UI:

Expanded Set of Default Proxy Repositories: New installations of Nexus will now have an expanded set of default proxy repository.   This release of Nexus adds proxy repositories for Google Code and java.net’s Maven 2 and Maven 1 repositories.

Nexus Professional 1.5.0 Highlights

Enterprise LDAP Plugin: Enhancement to Nexus LDAP configuration, allowing for detailed configuration of cache parameters, configuring multiple LDAP servers, using backup mirrors, and more.

Archive Browser Plugin: Now you can view the content of common archive files (zip, jar, ear and war) right in nexus, from the storage browser, search results and index browser. Simply click on the desired archive file, and you can now browse it.

Viewing Javadoc from Nexus: In Nexus Professional, when you are browsing a repository, you can now right-click on a Javadoc artifact and select View Javadoc.

Customize the Nexus Interface with Your Logo: The optional Nexus Branding plugin, adds a branding image that will override the Sonatype logo in upper left hand portion of UI.  You can define a path to a .png file in (nexus-base-dir)/conf/plexus.properties.  The key is named branding.image.path.