+1 for Ant... While I've been a maven advocate a long time and still like (some of) the ideas behind it, I've lost my belief in it.
For (large) development groups with a strict company policy and control/guidance and dedicated attention to maintaining maven repositories and keeping poms in sync, maven may still be the best way to go. But, you better have maximum to absolute control over users environments then. And, as David Taylor also mentioned, you must be willing to sacrifice good IDE support for debugging and testing. I do belief others are getting good results with maven. For one of my clients this is indeed the case (even with maven-1). But I expect most will be in a situation as I described above. In all other situations my experience with maven has been negative or very negative. It has been a very big productivity loss in numerous occasions for me, especially when trying to deal with the plugin and custom J2 setups. Until now, Randy only ported the static part of our maven-1 environment. Even that hasn't been easy and already needs dirty workarounds to get that far. But I think the most important build features J2 should provide are simple configuration, build and deployment for custom portals. And especially that type of customization is, and in my opinion will remain, the biggest problem with maven. The J2 customization we currently provide with maven-1 is rather crude and full of issues. If I believed maven-2 would allow us to solve our customization wishes and make this easy and transparently to use, I would now vote for spending more time on it. Well, I don't. I expect we will still need to write custom "goals", ant build script, or whatever to be called by or "hacked" into the maven-2 build process as we're doing today with horrendous maven.xml/plugin jelly code. Ate Randy Watler wrote:
All, We now have a marginal Maven2 build that is capable of building J2 and installing on Tomcat. While it has been fun reinventing the wheel for the Nth time, it is time to get serious about the J2 build. Here are the options: 1. Continue on with Maven1/J2 plugin. 2. Step up and complete the Maven2 build and create an archetype to replace the genapp capabilities. 3. Ditch maven and go with Ant. We need to vote on this before I or anyone else puts more sunk time into the build. Here are some of the issues: 1. Ant is simple and everyone understands it. 2. Maven1 and the plugin are not stable and are generally complex. 3. Maven2 has simplified things in some ways, but made them more complex in other ways with the pom.xml inheritance and transitive dependencies. 4. Ant build.xml files can become unmanageable. 5. Maven2 may not be sufficiently mature for our use; we have encountered several bugs and have used some ugly workarounds for even our simple build cases handled to date. 6. J2 users have not been exposed to maven, and it can become a liability quickly since they expect Ant like builds. 7. All IDEs, including Eclipse, can natively build Ant based projects. 8. When the BSR or other repos are down, the Maven offline builds are hopeless. 9. The training/learning curve with maven is hurting acceptance of the J2 portal solution. 10. The repository in Maven2 will become even more difficult to manage with the transitive dependencies: in the end, we will be forced to manage our own repository and all of the J2 users will need to do the same. I am sure there are more... this is not exactly a new topic for any of us. We are just at the point where we need to make a final decision that can stand the test of time... J2 needs our cycles, not the build environment. I am willing to put more time into the build no matter which way we choose to go... but not unless there is a consensus on the matter. Randy --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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