Woonsan Ko wrote:
Dear Dave,
- Making the build process easy - Providing a uniform build system - Providing quality project information - Providing guidelines for best practices development - Allowing transparent migration to new features
Most of that sounds like marketing gobbledygook to me. Nice sounding words, but no real substance. How is M2 easier than Ant exactly? Is the Maven build more "uniform" than the Ant build? Only if you mean uniform across different projects, but ya know, that just doesn't strike me as a big deal. Most projects use a roughly common set of target names and it's usually pretty easy to figure out what means what when beginning with a new project, in my experience. OTOH, Maven is over-engineered to the point that doing something as simple as changing the compiler source level means pasting a huge blob of XML into a pom.xml file: <http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-compiler-plugin/howto.html> Whereas with Ant it's as simple as changing a line like this: <javac source="1.4" ... /> to <javac source="1.6" ... /> just to use one example. All of that said, we are actually using a slightly different build system when we build Roller as part of OpenQabal. But it's not Maven, it's just our own common Ant build file. We think it gives us most of the advantages of Maven while leaving out the stuff we find to be fairly superfluous (like the output of maven site:site or whatever it is) and keeping the nice simple ant way of doing things. The main advantages we find with using Ivy and this build environment is that it does make managing dependencies easier (same as Maven in this regard) and it lets us manage things in a project / sub-project hierarchy (again, same as Maven). So we can, for example publish Roller artifacts (like the war file(s)) to a repository where they can then be pulled in as declared dependencies of our "main" project for inclusion in the EAR. But all of this makes sense for OpenQabal, it doesn't really mean anything for Roller per-se, or I would have considered proposing to Dave to adopt this environment for Roller. But as he says, the existing system works, so why mess with it? :-) TTYL, -- Phillip Rhodes Chief Architect - OpenQabal https://openqabal.dev.java.net
