Patrick Moore wrote:
Requiring someone be an expert to survive in their job does not make an advocate.Make maven invisible. Make the motto of maven be "No Experts required."
Maven 1 definitely had that motto - when I first started using maven 1, maven sold itself as a no brainer.
The conversion to maven 2 however has been painful, largely because for many plugins, the default behavior doesn't result in success.
For example: One of the great strengths of the maven-ejb-plugin and maven-ear-plugin is that I as a developer don't have to know or care how an ejb and an ear are constructed. I don't have to care about classpaths, and metadata, and other nonsense that distracts me from my core purpose: make the code do what it needs to do. But the experience of getting these two to generate the correct classpath was a painful exercise requiring a non default configuration. It should have worked out the box, no assembly required. Instead it involved many painful trips to Google.
One of the core strengths of the maven system is "let maven do it". It stops the developers who insist on writing their own weird custom only-works-on-their-machine methods of building things in ant or another tool. But people will only trust maven to do it if maven does what the developer needs to do easily and with no pain.
Regards, Graham --
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