There are some major pros and cons with Maven.  We moved to Maven about two
months ago for a relatively small code base in conparison to ofBiz.  One of
our developers spent a lot of time (weeks) getting the dependencies and
assemblies working correctly.  Not all libraries are as easy to resolve and
it took using a package explorer product to weed out some odd dependencies.


Pros:
  - Continum build integration with svn - cool stuff - click and build -
automated builds when code checked in to svn.  Email notifications of build
errors.
  - Assemblies !!!
  - Automated Eclipse / IntellaJ Idea project file generation (* some
dependency order issues)

Cons:
  - Longer build process
  - Very complex and time consuming to setup "correctly".
  - Maven documentation is very limited

In the end we have benefited from the move from ant to maven but it didn't
come cheap.  Moving ofBiz over would probably be a lot more work than we
had.  After getting acclimated with ofBiz and the ant scripts, I can get
through the code, compile, run cycle in a matter of 5-10 sec.  I don't know
if that would be the case with Maven.

* dependency order issues - when we generate the idea project file, it does
not honor the dependency order specified in the configuration files.  In
addition, it adds jars to the class path that doesn't necessarily need to.
In both cases, I believe them to be bugs.  This requires the developer to
manually tweak their ide after generation of the project file.

-John

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