The new Spincast Process Utils plugin provides utilities to manipulate processes and external programs.

The main features are:

• "Running a goal on an external Maven project" - Allows you to programmatically compile/package/install an external Maven project. The Maven project can be on your classpath: it will first be extracted to the file system before the goal is executed.
• "Executing an external program" - Allows you to easily execute an external program and keep control over the created process.

By combining those utilities, it is now possible to test code inside a .jar file! Indeed, running tests from an IDE (or using the command line) doesn't always represent the production environment, where everything is bundled in an executable .jar file.

Finally, two new utility methods are provided by the SpincastUtils component:

• copyClasspathFileToFileSystem(...), to copy a single file from the classpath to the file system.
• copyClasspathDirToFileSystem(...), to copy a full directory from the classpath to the file system.