On Oct 12, 2010, at 10:01 PM, Martin Gainty wrote: > Suprisingly maven is not the first programming language to use XML
This is worth clarifying. What makes Maven unique, and I believe groundbreaking, is that the POM is declarative, not procedural. It is not a programming language in the traditional sense. There are many examples of procedural languages written in XML, and many agree they are painful to use. That's why the one that was used in Maven 1.x is notably absent from Maven 2.x. Once you get used to the paradigm shift and get used to it, it becomes remarkably easy to look at any build and find what it is doing. While many systems (like Ivy) have started using Maven's central repository, if they use procedural descriptions of a build, they are missing the vision that Maven has. Personally, I find it frustrating to have to dissect an Ant build to figure out what's going on. A Maven build is validated against a schema, and finding what I am looking for is predictable and quick. It's also fast to write, since most IDEs can do type-completion with a schema declaration, and many have been augmented to read plugin.xml files inside plugins to do type completion of plugin configuration as well. Lastly, having a validated structure for the build allows IDEs to import the POM directly, and because the Plugin interface is so simple, it's easy for IDEs to integrate against plugins. In my experience, this level of integration is unique to Maven. Hope you stick with it. Maven will really grow on you, as it has with a huge number of folks over the last few years. Brian --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
