On Sat, 09 Oct 2004 11:40:44 +0800, Nathan Coast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for replying so fast, > > I'm a maven contributor so am obviously biased towards everything maven :) > > > The one really important value add that I see, downloading dependencies > > automatically, > > I'd disagree with you here, yes dependency downloading is very useful, > but IMO, the biggest advantage of using maven is process re-use. What > do I mean by this? well I guess I mean script re-use, if you want to > build a web-app, you don't have to create a build.xml. As the plug-ins > evolve the scripts become more sophisticated - more customisable and > optimised. My experience with build.xml is that people hack away at the > scripts adding tweaks and improvements. At the end of the project much > of this work is lost as the scripts don't transfer easily to other > projects.
The 'import' and 'macro' tasks in Ant give us script reuse with plain old Ant. > There are literally thousands of example projects out there - j2ee > blueprints, struts examples etc.. etc... Each of these have their own > ant scripts achieving the same tasks in slightly different ways. > Developers, especially those new to a technology will start by copying > and modifying those scripts. > > The maven plug-ins provide a mechanism for all projects to 'share' the > same scripts. Over time, experience and work from many projects feeds > back into the core scripts. As the plug-ins improve, your dev team > should spend more time solving your project specific problems rather > than generic build tasks e.g. how to copy dependencies into the lib > directory. One of the problems I see with Maven is that this is a nice theory that doesn't seem to work out very often. Many, if not most, of the projects I've seen that use Maven have had to customise those "standard" tasks in some way to do what they need to do. IMHO, this is where much of the mystery lies in figuring out what happened when things go wrong. -- Martin Cooper > That being said, some of the plug-ins are written in such a way that > they are difficult to understand and customise. It could be that a > complex project such as struts still requires its own build.xml (or > maven.xml), but (again IMO) very generic tasks such as assembling web > applications and jar files are perfectly suited to generic scripts such > as those provided by the maven plug-ins. > > > I won't stand in the way of a migration to Maven if the other > > developers want to build and maintain the system ... > > should there be some vote on this? I am not a struts committer so have > no say in the matter. However, the outcome of such a decision will > affect some of the work we're doing here for struts / maven related > plug-ins. > > > but I'm > > personally going to generate build.xml files for the subprojects for > > my own personal use, and I'm gonna be unhappy if that doesn't work > > because of dramatically customized Maven builds. > > I'd be interested to learn where you feel plug-in scripts don't satisfy > your build requirements. I'd be the first to agree that the plug-ins > aren't perfect. > > cheers > Nathan > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
