[ajug-members] Maven 2 [was: favorite IDE]

[Björn Gustafsson]

To me the biggest drawback with Maven 2 is the implicitness of the
targets.  In Ant your build.xml tells you what you can do with the
project.  By contrast all the Maven POM file tells you are
dependencies.  The "targets" are all defined by Maven's conventions,
and possibly by plugins that you or others supply.

IDEs can help out with this by providing a list of the available
options for running maven, but at least when you first start using it
that's not terribly helpful either, as there may be dozens or hundreds
of them.  Some of them may have unexpected consequences, too, which
can be difficult to discover without trying them.

The upside of this approach is that once you get used to Maven's
conventions, you can go to just about any maven project and know how
to build it.

On 8/11/06, Howard Kapustein <hkapustein at manh.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, maven's got good spots.
>  What's the downsides?
>
>  Come on. "all tools suck, they just suck differently." so what's maven's
> drawbacks?
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org <ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org>
>  To: General AJUG membership forum (100-200 messages/month)
> <ajug-members at ajug.org>
>  Sent: Fri Aug 11 07:43:01 2006
>  Subject: Re: [ajug-members] favorite IDE
>
>  Ya, and that's another great things about Maven.  You can generate an
>  Ant build file based off of your current Maven build (pom.xml) for
>  your developers/users/customers who don't have Maven.  As your
>  project grows and matures, you can regenerate anything again at any
>  time (Eclipse configs, Ant build scripts, etc, etc).
>
>  Oh!  And don't *even* get me started on Archetypes,  you'll be
>  drooling after 2 minutes.
>
>  --
>  James Mitchell
>  678.910.8017
>
>  On Aug 10, 2006, at 5:55 PM, Justin Meads wrote:
>
>  > We don't use Eclipse for our build process (only development).  We
>  > use CruiseControl to keep us honest and our production builds are
>  > performed on Unix with Ant (which recursively calls make to build
>  > the C++ portion of the app).
>  >
>  > -Justin
>  >
>  > On Aug 10, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Howard Kapustein wrote:
>  >
>  >>> With Maven 2, you simply tell it you want Hibernate and what version
>  >> and
>  >>> it will get and use *that* Hibernate versions dependencies
>  >> THAT is what I'm looking for.
>  >>
>  >> I want - need - to specify what my project uses, what versions are
>  >> used,
>  >> and ensure "the right thing happens" e.g. given environment variables
>  >> (or the like)
>  >>
>  >> HIBERNATE_DIR=c:\hibernate
>  >> HIBERNATE_VER=3.0.3
>  >>
>  >> where ***these are not 'owned' by Eclipse***. Jamming those in a
>  >> trivial
>  >> .batch file or .shell script and feeding them to various tools is a
>  >> necessity. For those of us who <gasp> use more than just Eclipse
>  >> in our
>  >> build process (interactively as well as automated).
>  >>
>  >> When I jam versions and paths into Eclipse (be it .classpath or
>  >> workspace property files) I lose that flexibility and control.
>  >>
>  >> For those of you who have no qualms living, breathing and ONLY using
>  >> Eclipse as the 'parent' master process, more power to you. But I
>  >> think
>  >> you've misspelled emacs.
>  >>
>  >>
>  >> Maven 2 sounds interesting.
>  >>
>  >>      - Howard
>  >>
>  >> -----Original Message-----
>  >> From: ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org
>  >> [mailto:ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org] On Behalf Of
> James Mitchell
>  >> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 4:29 PM
>  >> To: Users Group Atlanta Java
>  >> Subject: Re: [ajug-members] favorite IDE
>  >>
>  >> I was replying and realized this might make a good blog, so...
>  >>
>  >> http://jamesmitchell.us/space/start/2006-08-10/1#Eclipse_gripes
>  >>
>  >> --
>  >> James Mitchell
>  >> 678.910.8017

-- 
Björn Gustafsson