Firstly, let me be clear: I have nothing against Maven, so it's not a question of liking one thing over another. And I realize I'm not on the Struts development team anyway so my opinion probably means even *less* than some others, but I offer it none the less :)
As I look through the Getting Started docs on the Maven site, I'm met with some phrases of concern right off the bat:
"For those that have already skimmed the documentation on this site, you may be asking yourself, what *exactly* does it mean to use Maven?"
To which I reply: "If I've skimmed the documentation, why would I have any doubt as to what using Maven really means? Is it THAT complicated?!? Shouldn't I have a fairly clear picture at this point?"
Then there's:
"That question will have different answers over time as Maven evolves..."
...Which concerns me because I'm thinking "Gee, does that mean I'm starting down a path that's going to result in me having to keep up with something that's just getting MORE complicated?"
Neither of these are big enough to make me think "Oh, forget Maven!", but they do raise an eyebrow. Again, remember that I'm not talking about the people that already know Maven... like I said before, it's just like any other tool: you start out being a bit intimidated (perhaps), and as you gain experience it becomes no problem and you wonder why you ever had any problem at all! But for someone coming to it for the first time, statements like the above might be a bit disconcerting.
Then you get to the part of the documentation talking about installation and you have to deal with the concept of a "repository". Sure, you probably notice the part that says you can skip this step if you have trouble, but then your back to asking "why should I have any trouble at such an early stage??" and again your getting a tad more worried.
Then you get it installed and set up (and realize it actually wasn't a big deal), but now your confronted with the whole "project object model" idea. Which, again, turns out to not be such a big deal at all, but it's one more hurdle to jump.
The point I'm trying to make here is in no way disparaging of Maven at all, and it shouldn't be read as an endorsement of Ant over Maven. What I am trying to illustrate is that the barrier to entry with Maven involved is a little bit higher for a beginner than for Ant IMHO, and that could potentially dissuade some people from contributing to a project. I don't want to make more of this point than should be made of it because, ultimately, it's probably a very minor consideration.
In the end, you aren't going to hear any complaints from me regardless of which is chosen, I was just raising what I thought might be a valid concern. Certainly if no one agrees with the assessment in the first place than there's nothing left to debate (and never actually was I suppose), so Maven it is! :)
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Joe Germuska wrote:
At 10:36 PM +0100 2/23/05, Arnaud HERITIER wrote:
If possible you can generate the ant script with maven so you won't have to manually maintain it (It is already done like that in
jakarta commons).
If you want, you can commit it on SVN and ant users will able to build jars and run tests.
I'm generally opposed to committing any generated files to the SVN repository, as it always becomes confusing.
Hubert wrote:
In the meantime, curious users and > potential contributors won't have to be turned away by the > "intimidating" Maven requirement.
This is what I don't understand. Maven just isn't hard to install. You download it, you run it. The first time, it takes a while while it retrieves a bunch of dependencies. If you're Wendy, you have some headaches because of your IT environment ;-) but really, why is it intimidating? Just because less books have been written about it than Ant?
I'm fine with people not *liking* Maven -- but I don't know why they should be any more afraid of it than of any other third-party executable that they could download, Ant included.
Joe
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
