Re: Exploration of use of Maven for site generation and build

[Paul Glezen]

My limited experiences with Maven and Forrest have yielded observations very much in line with your comments.


Curt Arnold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 12/16/2005 03:07:23 PM:

> ...
> I had been interested in seeing if Apache Forrest (http://
> forrest.apache.org) might be an better solution, however comments I  
> overheard at the Hackathon and the Forrest session, suggested that it  
> might be a bit of an overkill for our needs.  
>
I've been excited about prospect of a tool like Forrest that easily generates project documentation.  But whenever I've tried it, I found that the allowed tags within the XML source are very restrictive.  It's nothing like free-form XML.  The Maven doc plug-in also has restrictions, but they are far less severe.

It seems that you can customize anything you want with Forrest, but not easily.  It seems to require Cocoon knowledge among other things.  The documentation of a project starts becoming more work than the project itself.

The last version of Forrest split many capabilities into plug-ins.  That's cool.  But the plug-in documentation is not well maintained.  You can find the name of a plug-in and what it's suppose to do for you, but steps for getting it working are lacking.  In fact, I found the Forrest documentation somewhat disorganized (ironic for a tool that generates docs).  I'd find one thing in the User's Guide, another in one sample, some other item in another sample.  When I wanted to go back and review, I could never remember where I saw it.  They need a more centralized doc.

Maven's docs are quite impressive.  But their demands on project structure seem rather oppresive.  The idea is that their recommended project structure is soooooo good that everyone should be using it and molding their projects to fit it (rather than molding Maven to their own misguided project structure).  Certainly there is a benefit to a uniform project structure across an organization.  But whether it should be the one Maven recommends is not so apparent.

Naturally, Maven can be customized.  But like Forrest, beyond the simplest customizations, you quickly start running into other technologies like Jelly for scripting.  Ugh, I was hoping a property file could do most things, not learn another language.

So I too have backed away from using Maven for total build management.  But the notion of using it just for the doc generation is tempting.

> ...  In particular, Maven has extensive support for  
> generating code analysis and coverage reports which could be useful  
> for log4j development.
>
They look really nice.

- Paul Glezen