On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 5:31 AM, Brian Topping <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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
Many traditional programming languages are declarative and not procedural or are based on declarative concepts, most of the time the declarative nature of such languages proved itself problematic. But seriously is there a comparison matrix somewhere which compares ant+ivy vs maven? As an ant+ivy user I have recently tried out maven (yes, i hand-wrote poms for about 15 projects) which mostly depend on each other, I got them all published in nexus etc. I must say that I'm pretty shaken how unreliable maven build are. With ant it either works or not. If it works, it works everywhere, in console, in eclipse in hudson. With maven, I got plenty of builds that run in console but not in eclipse, or in eclipse but not in hudson, or in hudson but not in console. Besides that I haven't found anything in maven that isn't present in ant somehow, except for parent-poms, but they got added to the recent ivy release so they don't count anymore ;-) I find it pretty hard to maintain versions with maven. Do I have to make them all depend on RELEASE version of each other? Distinct versions of each other? SNAPSHOTS? I started with snapshot, but I couldn't publish a second version without republishing everything, so I consider this bad idea... regards Leon P.S. Is there a documentation somewhere which really describes which lifecycle phase is meant for what? . > > 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] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
