- The plugin was designed to be easy and safe to use, because it must not
- never, never happen, that you blow away your production database when
- firering a maven-build of your webapp on your production-machine!
+ The plugin was designed with three main goals in mind:
+
+ * It should be easy to use.
+
+ * It should be maximal unlikely, to erase a producation-database by
+ accident.
+
+ * It should not slow down the development cycle.
+
+ To achieve the first goal, the convention-over-configuration paradigma
+ was applied and the plugin was stuffed with usefull logging-messages.
+ So, if in doubt, just turn on the {{{./debugging.html} debugging output}} with the <<<mvn -X ...>>>.
+
+ To achieve the second goal, the precedence in which the configuration
+ locations are consulted was layouted in a way that makes it possible, to
+ prevent overwrites of the wrong database by accident.
+
+ Last but not least, in order to not slow down the development cycle, the
+ hibernate4-maven-plugin only executes the schema-export, if the mapping
+ or the dialect changes (or if you force it to do so).
+