Re: Making the case for Maven to managment
Hi Josh, I'm starting migrating some projects to maven and personally I think that maven is the way to go because of three things (the 3 selling arguments I've used at work ;-) : 1. we can locate a project or a project module (an artifact in maven terminology) in space and time, i.e. we specify a maven coordinate ( repository url, groupId, artifactId, version) to what we are producing and as a consequence we're able to reference it in other projects. Previously to maven copying jars around was a really nightmare. 2. The POM (Project Object Model). We specify how a project looks like and let the plugins do the work. The nice thing about it is that the plugins are artifacts themselves and can be therefore easily located, downloaded and used. 3. Standard directory layout. Previously to maven we had a hard time trying to find a mutual consent on how the project structure should look like. The problem was that different groups work on different projects and we were not sure which layout would best fit our needs. Having a proposed layout from maven was at least a very good starting point. Cheers Alex Josh Long wrote: Hi everyone, I'm trying to make a case for Maven and I'm going to need to provide a better reason than it's better than a kick in the face! to managment. I'm at a bank, so everything is subject to heavy scrutiny. Essentially, our project hardly compiles and is so untestable that upon check out no less than 5 files need to change to get it to the point where we can compile it (once we've created a working project in either IntelliJ or Eclipse, which has hitherto never been too successful. Some of us just ant deploy every change instead of iteratively deploying using our IDE's weblogic facilities. So basically, I know I could solve the file issues with Maven profiles. I know that using the Maven site plugin and reports like PMD and JUnit and so on I could provide great dashboard like functionality into our application. I know that I can solve the broken project descriptors, too. All with Maven, but strictly speaking these are technically still process enhancements, which come down as a liability. In terms of shear resource hours, I should imagine 10 hours or so to get our two projects moved over and acheive parity with our current Ant script and even perhaps to solve all the Eclipse/IntelliJ nonsense and get decent, default mvn site generation, and to change our existing production support script which is Ant to interface with the ant script Maven will generate for us. Basically, it won't take a lot. But that's not enough. How do I make this case in the face of so hostile a mentality? Have you ever had to make the case? Any insight on how to move forward would be appreciated. Thanks, Joshua Long Sun Certified Java Programmer http://www.joshlong.com/ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Making the case for Maven to managment
Hi everyone, I'm trying to make a case for Maven and I'm going to need to provide a better reason than it's better than a kick in the face! to managment. I'm at a bank, so everything is subject to heavy scrutiny. Essentially, our project hardly compiles and is so untestable that upon check out no less than 5 files need to change to get it to the point where we can compile it (once we've created a working project in either IntelliJ or Eclipse, which has hitherto never been too successful. Some of us just ant deploy every change instead of iteratively deploying using our IDE's weblogic facilities. So basically, I know I could solve the file issues with Maven profiles. I know that using the Maven site plugin and reports like PMD and JUnit and so on I could provide great dashboard like functionality into our application. I know that I can solve the broken project descriptors, too. All with Maven, but strictly speaking these are technically still process enhancements, which come down as a liability. In terms of shear resource hours, I should imagine 10 hours or so to get our two projects moved over and acheive parity with our current Ant script and even perhaps to solve all the Eclipse/IntelliJ nonsense and get decent, default mvn site generation, and to change our existing production support script which is Ant to interface with the ant script Maven will generate for us. Basically, it won't take a lot. But that's not enough. How do I make this case in the face of so hostile a mentality? Have you ever had to make the case? Any insight on how to move forward would be appreciated. Thanks, Joshua Long Sun Certified Java Programmer http://www.joshlong.com/
Re: Making the case for Maven to managment
Hi, having survived an Ant-Maven migration process, I would advise you to really be sure that Maven supports out of the box all the things you are already doing with Ant. Otherwise you might get some nasty surprises, that would fragile your position. Maven is a nice tool, but if it does not support out of the box something, you might have a huge task ahead. Regards, Paulo On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Josh Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi everyone, I'm trying to make a case for Maven and I'm going to need to provide a better reason than it's better than a kick in the face! to managment. I'm at a bank, so everything is subject to heavy scrutiny. Essentially, our project hardly compiles and is so untestable that upon check out no less than 5 files need to change to get it to the point where we can compile it (once we've created a working project in either IntelliJ or Eclipse, which has hitherto never been too successful. Some of us just ant deploy every change instead of iteratively deploying using our IDE's weblogic facilities. So basically, I know I could solve the file issues with Maven profiles. I know that using the Maven site plugin and reports like PMD and JUnit and so on I could provide great dashboard like functionality into our application. I know that I can solve the broken project descriptors, too. All with Maven, but strictly speaking these are technically still process enhancements, which come down as a liability. In terms of shear resource hours, I should imagine 10 hours or so to get our two projects moved over and acheive parity with our current Ant script and even perhaps to solve all the Eclipse/IntelliJ nonsense and get decent, default mvn site generation, and to change our existing production support script which is Ant to interface with the ant script Maven will generate for us. Basically, it won't take a lot. But that's not enough. How do I make this case in the face of so hostile a mentality? Have you ever had to make the case? Any insight on how to move forward would be appreciated. Thanks, Joshua Long Sun Certified Java Programmer http://www.joshlong.com/
Re: Making the case for Maven to managment
Hi, There is maven-ant-plugin which allows you to do everything which you can do in ant. However, you shouldn't use it too much because it is inconsistent with maven ideology :). Cheers, Piotr Oktaba On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 14:25 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote: Hi, having survived an Ant-Maven migration process, I would advise you to really be sure that Maven supports out of the box all the things you are already doing with Ant. Otherwise you might get some nasty surprises, that would fragile your position. Maven is a nice tool, but if it does not support out of the box something, you might have a huge task ahead. Regards, Paulo On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Josh Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi everyone, I'm trying to make a case for Maven and I'm going to need to provide a better reason than it's better than a kick in the face! to managment. I'm at a bank, so everything is subject to heavy scrutiny. Essentially, our project hardly compiles and is so untestable that upon check out no less than 5 files need to change to get it to the point where we can compile it (once we've created a working project in either IntelliJ or Eclipse, which has hitherto never been too successful. Some of us just ant deploy every change instead of iteratively deploying using our IDE's weblogic facilities. So basically, I know I could solve the file issues with Maven profiles. I know that using the Maven site plugin and reports like PMD and JUnit and so on I could provide great dashboard like functionality into our application. I know that I can solve the broken project descriptors, too. All with Maven, but strictly speaking these are technically still process enhancements, which come down as a liability. In terms of shear resource hours, I should imagine 10 hours or so to get our two projects moved over and acheive parity with our current Ant script and even perhaps to solve all the Eclipse/IntelliJ nonsense and get decent, default mvn site generation, and to change our existing production support script which is Ant to interface with the ant script Maven will generate for us. Basically, it won't take a lot. But that's not enough. How do I make this case in the face of so hostile a mentality? Have you ever had to make the case? Any insight on how to move forward would be appreciated. Thanks, Joshua Long Sun Certified Java Programmer http://www.joshlong.com/
Re: Making the case for Maven to managment
On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 4:07 AM, Josh Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How do I make this case in the face of so hostile a mentality? Have you ever had to make the case? Any insight on how to move forward would be appreciated. Well: you believe it'll solve some problems for you. Look at those problems and solutions and see if any of them matter to the people to whom you'll be making the case, or if the ancillary effects (the time it takes to make a change, the reliability of the software) might matter to them. Secondarily, try and make yourself aware of the problems that they believe they face, and whether or not Maven can help with those -- ultimately, if you make your case in terms of the things they care about, that's where you're most likely to make an impact. It's hard for me to know, on the outside, who those people are, what they care about, the problems for which they'd like solutions, and so forth, so I can only give you the advice on this generic level. Ultimately, though, if you've already got Ant, I'd say that there aren't a ton of problems that you can solve with Maven that you can't solve with Ant; you might find the one or the other more to your liking, but if you can't get through these issues with Ant, I'm not certain that you'll be able to do so with Maven. (There are a few areas where the capabilities Maven stands out from Ant; things like metadata about dependencies that, if reliable, can tell you the license of the project, and so forth, but I find those to be the exception rather than the rule). - Geoffrey -- Geoffrey Wiseman
Re: Making the case for Maven to managment
Nah, we can drop ideology in the bitbucket. It's a matter of using the tool that best does the job. Maven is really good at representing the structure of large, complex projects simply, and pretty good at organizing the large-scale flow of operations involved in realizing them. Ant is rather good at giving you very close control of how specific tasks are carried out, when you are willing to do a lot of writing. Together they make a good team. You may find that specific step-by-step processing which is difficult to express in Maven is easily accomplished in Ant, and that structures which are overwhelmingly wordy in Ant become concise and natural in Maven. So, if you need both, use both. But use each where it helps more than it hurts. If you can do 90% of the task faster and with fewer mistakes in Maven, use it for that 90%. If the last 10% won't go in naturally, then use Ant for the 10% -- forcing the tool is one common source of errors and delays. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Typically when a software vendor says that a product is intuitive he means the exact opposite. pgpGoHZAJTjsh.pgp Description: PGP signature
