While I guess some big advantages are: 1. Jars out of SCM. Depending on the number/size of your JARs and your choice of SCM you could see big time benefits on branch/checkout/etc operations, and a corresponding lack of strain on your SCM server.
2. Reporting/site-plugin. The site stage of Maven allows you to keep your documentation in with your source, which to some degree can ensure consitency between the code and documentation. There are also plugins that produce things like javadoc, extract docs from TLDs etc. that will can automatically show up on a website whenever a new deployment is done. 3. Standardization. This is probably the biggest one. Instead of whatever custom conventions for project structure you have internally you can always point people to the Maven standards. Where do tests go? Resources? Groovy code? a new dependency? It's nice not having to think about these sorts of things any more, as they really have nothing to do with what you're trying to accomplish. 4. IDE integration. I'm actually in the middle of a maven conversion of a pretty huge unwieldly project, and one thing I'm looking foward to is automatic configuration of IDEs (Eclipse/IDEA). We did a partial maven-conversion about a year ago, but left a lot of stuff up to ANT. This meant whenever something new was needed we needed to adjust the maven build (for deployment), the ant build (for local dev) and the IDE project files. This was horribly time consuming and error prone. I haven't tried it yet, but the maven IDE plugins purport to handle the generation of modules/classpath management. All that being said, if you go forward with it my one piece of advice is take it all the way so that all developers are using maven for all tasks. People may be reluctant to learn maven if they can still 'get by' with ant, and as such you'll be left doing support for all maven issues. If you ensure everyone uses maven for everything (ok 99% of things), you'll find yourself surrounded by a lot more maven experts than if you hadn't. On Dec 10, 2007 8:57 AM, Luis Roberto P. Paula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> As to whether or not it's worth it is another question. What is your > motivation for performing the conversion? What problems are you currently > experiencing with your ant-built process that you felt needed alleviation? > > Actually, our ant-build process works fine and it is well-structured. We > thought that we could incorporate some advantages from maven, such as > repositories and work in a more high-level way. But nothing is too simple > and wonderful like those "Hello world" examples. > > > On Dec 10, 2007 11:20 AM, Kallin Nagelberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > You may wish to start by using the maven-antrun-plugin, breaking up the > > ant > > into smaller files that you put alongside each pom of your multi-module > > project. This way you can avoid writing all the plugins/complex poms > that, > > while ideal, would take more time initially. > > That is the approach my project took, and we had at least 4 ant files > (in > > the core) with probably about 1000 lines at least. Hopefully once you go > > through the process of breaking up the ant you will become intimately > > familiar with it's content, and have a better idea of how much work will > > be > > required to complete a full conversion. > > > > As to whether or not it's worth it is another question. What is your > > motivation for performing the conversion? What problems are you > currently > > experiencing with your ant-built process that you felt needed > alleviation? > > > > > > On Dec 10, 2007 8:14 AM, Luis Roberto P. Paula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > > Hi, > > > > > > I'm work in a huge java project that has a ant script with almost 800 > > > lines. > > > > > > The last two weeks I'm trying to convert this script into a maven2 > > > multiproject, in order to simplify the build process, and its being > such > > a > > > pain in the ass. > > > > > > My questions are: > > > - Is it worth to do this? > > > - I know it is a great software, but in what causes maven is not > > > recommended? > > > > > > Thanks, > > > Luis > > > > > >
