Just to give the feedback: I've been told that installing a repository
and an MRM is a breeze, takes a one-minute-install, etc. etc.
I should have read the implied fine print: This will work only for a
strictly local install, and even then, there are snags.
1) When sitting behind a firewall in a Windows world, Java software has
trouble connecting to the outside world. Neither Sun nor Oracle ever
bothered to properly interface with NTLM, leaving the task to
third-party developers that had sometimes more, sometimes less success.
MRMs are no exception to that rule.
2) Getting the caching and proxying settings properly configured turned
out to be really difficult. Nexus ultimately failed with that - for some
reason, it would never work. I could Artifactory get to do my bidding,
but the entire experience took me a full two days of work. For both
products, one of the bigger problems was that error messages were not
detailed enough.
3) Configuration was sometimes needlessly difficult. Nexus is a point in
case - what's really just a simple set of fallbacks where to get your
artifacts from turned out to be a bedazzling maze of "repositories",
"routing", and something else I forgot (or maybe my memory is inventing
that, I have been fighting too many different problems to keep track of
all details).
Artifactory did a better job at making individual parts of the
configuration testable, but some error situations from an Active
Directory LDAP were utterly misleading. (I eventually gave up on LDAP, I
found Artifactory's permission system utterly confusing and it wouldn't
do what I wanted - here, Nexus was better.)
Some may remember that I was quite resistant to drink the MRM kool-aid.
I was even heavily scolded for that.
Well... what should I say... I don't consider myself an utter idiot, yet
my resistance was all too well-founded, it seems. The message was "five
minutes", neither MRM lived up to that promise.
<RANT MODE> I'M SICK AND TIRED OF ALL THAT MONEY-MAKING-MOTIVATED
MISLABELING THAT HAS BECOME SO COMMON. At least the Apache guys never
claimed that configuring it was easy, but in the Java world, everybody
is trying to sell his Snake Oil relabelled as Kool-Aid.</RANT MODE>
Sorry. That needed to be blown off.
If you guys hadn't made so unrealistic and misleading promises, I might
have praised what's working (which is quite a lot actually) instead of
criticizing what isn't (which ultimately made Nexus fail, and
Artifactory pass - barely and with slightly limited but sufficient
functionality).
Regards,
Jo
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