It sounds like you are struggling with some of the same issues I am. I was asked recently to change our build system from ant to maven. In fact, I did not want to use maven. I felt that our needs did not warrant it and thought that Ivy would do well to solve our biggest problem, dependency management. I have since changed my mind and feel that the move to maven was a good one.
When someone tells me to go work with a new technology, the first thing I do is learn everything I can about it. So I read "Better Builds with Maven" and I read the POM and Settings reference on the web site and I started researching plugins and what they do for us. Now, I work on a team of developers that puts out a framework that the client applications use to access business services ( standard stateless session fascade interface implemented in a Spring container using hibernate and some ejb services provided by another group on the back end ), so when I was tasked with switching to maven it was for the framework, not all the client apps. I assumed that other engineers on the client teams ( they were all made aware of the schedule for the transition ) would pick up maven, like I did, and learn it and start asking questions pertaining to how to integrate the framework with their new maven builds ( we use AspectJ to instrument the client code so our integration is a little more complex then a simple dependency. ) What I got was a bunch of questions about how to use maven. I kept having to explain to people what plugins are and how to configure them. How maven inheritance works and how it is unrelated to multi module builds. How properties can be used to trigger profiles. What profiles are good for and what they are not good for. Keep in mind I have only been using this tool for a few months and I would not call myself an expert by any streatch of the imagination. I have also been hearing a lot of compaints. Some from the developers but a bunch from management. Mostly, I think, because the developers are blaming maven for delays. The blame really should be put on the fact that they did not bother to learn maven. So, I think the barrier to adopting maven in my organization is the learning curve and it sounds like the same thing in yours. I also have some comments below: > -----Original Message----- > From: Joshua ChaitinPollak [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > We've been living with parallel Ant and Maven build systems > for 6 to 9 months now, and most developers are mostly onto > Maven, but some still use Ant from time to time. > > I just polled the rest of my development team for who still > uses our ant build system and why. > > So Maven core developers, Here are some of the reasons I heard: > > 1) I can't do the equivalent of ant -projecthelp Pointing out > that all the common maven commands are documented on the wiki > doesn't seem to alleviate this concern, which I admit really > puzzles me. Has anyone else encountered this complaint about > maven? I think the ability to easy get a list of configured > plugins within the pom would be really handy. > Until a "fix" is available from the maven team, maybe maintain a readme.txt in the directory next to each POM. > 2) We have lots of ant run-* targets I like to use. > My response: Letting them know of the mvnrun script I've > checked into our source tree that effectively runs the following: > > mvn compile exec:java $MVNOPT -Dexec.mainClass="$CLASSNAME" - > Dexec.args="$ARG" > > This allows the user to type: > > mvnrun MyMainClass --args > > The script searches for the MyMainClass.java file, figures > out the full package name, and fills in the parameters above. > > 3) We use the ant tags target to run etags to create emacs > TAGS files I pointed these developers to a mktags script that > does the same thing. I also added 'mvn generate-sources' to > the script first, to make sure the tags catch those generated > java files. > A plugin that generates this would be great. But a in the meantime you could use the antrun plugin to get the tags generated with each compile. If you add it to a profile, then developers that don't use the tags files can turn it off in their settings.xml. Dana H. P'Simer Dana.P'[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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