We would like to go away from a highly customized build process to a standardize process to build, develop, release and test software.
While Ant is tool which is good to compile software we are already need to extend it with Ivy to get dependency management. While Ivy is also using Maven repositories in the end. Maven will integrate that in one tool without hacking our own way. Maven further has standardized hooks for instance to release software. For example this entire naming convention "-SNAPSHOT" that we simulate manually, actually its root is from Maven, where this is just the way Maven calls the packages. And Maven supplies a build target to create a release, commit the tag to the SVN and update the main branch to with the version name in one go. Same for Testing, we simulate Maven functionality while Maven has a build in target that would nicely integrate with Jenkins to generate our test reports. Building the test suite is part of the Maven release and build process. So every build will automatically include the regression test. Instead of us manually somehow hook some hand coded ant builds in some order, Maven would do that. In other words: It is not just a tool to compile something, it is framework for the entire software development life cycle , build, develop, test and release. Besides that it makes it easier for us to build components that are less coupled and can life on their own. We can build multiple Maven plugins. While we do not see use in some of our JARs and classes, others might be. The more accessible we make our project the easier it will be for 3rd party to hook into our application and contribute something. Our ANT script is pretty much an organic grown monster. I started it with 10 lines of build script. Now it is thousands. For anybody beyond you and me this is pretty much un-maintainable. And with Maven we do not only solve that but also can get rid of some of the custom build script as it is already build into Maven. So from my point of view that would be a very desirable goal to migrate to Maven. It is probably not as straightforward as switching a couple of flags, but the longer we wait the more difficult it will be to maintain what we have. Sebastian On Apr 4, 2014 9:26 PM, "Maxim Solodovnik" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Sebastian, > > I have started to migrate our build system to maven. > Could you please remind me why do we need such migration? > > -- > WBR > Maxim aka solomax >
