Hi to all, I feel compelled to add my 50 cents advice to this thread :-) I could have written chas's mail some months ago, when I began switching my projects from maven1 to maven2 (2.0.1 at that time), feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of taming the beast and frustrated by the fragmentation and the scarcity of the documentation.
The arrival of mergere's book is definitely a great move towards widespread adoption and clear understanding of maven2's features and I too am a bit surprised that advertisement about it should be quite "secretive". There may be unknown constraints but it would be really useful to include a link on maven's site first page. So the lack of documentation is becoming less of a problem than before. I now use maven for all my projects, whether small or big. I have setup an internal repository for my former employer, together with https access and private certificates, projects/customer specific repositories, a maven proxy and a continuum driven integrated build process. We used it to work on a large project (and with off-shore devlopment) and were very happy with some features of maven2 that would have been difficult to implement with m1 or ant: - the multi projects features are very easy to setup, - settings.xml and profiles are really great for cleanly customizing partr of a build acording to the environment, - creation of (simple) archetypes is easy, and this helps when you need to break a project into many similar small projects (features or screens), - the repository mechanism and the version mangement is tricky to understand (and I think there are things I do not yet fully master) but works fine and you have complete control over what is downloaded and how, - and most importantly, creating custom plugins is childplay when compared with maven1 and those stupid jelly scripts (forgive me if you happen to be a jelly contributor but I think the mere idea of creating a script language in XML is silly ;-) ). As for the problems, here is what I still find annoying: - the cobertura plugin, only alternative to clover plugin is still a bit difficult to use. And unit testing without code coverage is like shooting in the dark. This is the plugin I missed more, - central repository is an important issue, at least when new features are added to your build. May be a distributed scheme, something along the lines of ptp systems would be nice, - I did not use the releas plugin yet but it seems a bit "touchy". All in all, I find maven2 is a great project and an improvement over other build systems I am aware of (make, ant and maven1). I would find difficult now to undertake java projects without it (I would rather give up eclipse if given the choice !) although I miss good documentation. regards, -- OQube < software engineering \ génie logiciel > Arnaud Bailly, Dr. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
