maven

[Christopher Brind <br...@brindy.org.uk>]

Unless I've missed something (or maybe I'm reading between the lines) there
seems to be an assumption that we're moving to Maven.

I've never used Maven, though I do from time to review whether or not it
will be useful to me.  So far I haven't seen a use-case where it actually
adds benefit (above and beyond anything I can put together in Ant), but
that's just in my little world.

My understanding is that once you go down the Maven route it is very hard to
get out of it if you decide it's not for your project.  It also seems like
quite a big dependency to have for building your project.  At the moment all
I need is ant and an SVN client.

I know there are a lot of Maven fans out there, so I'm open to giving it a
chance, but I think we should all be committed to it.

So before this project considers moving to Maven I would like to see:
- a volunteer to be Maven champion
- a list of benefits that it will add to the project
- a list of disadvantages
- a getting started overview for people working on pivot
- a getting started overview for people working with pivot
- an overview of how people working on pivot would work day to day
- an overview of how people working with pivot would work day to day

Then we should vote on it.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Chris

Re: maven

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

Hi,

I am myself an Maven addict. Literally an addict, since I hate it, yet
can't live without it. Why is that?

1. It is dirt easy to get going on a new project. Literally, 1 minute setup...

2. Any awkward technology I want to bring into the project later,
chances are that there is a Maven plugin available to ease the
introduction.

3. Dependency Management is straight forward and with artifact index
support in IDEA (my IDE), I even have code completion for dependencies
available on central repositories.

4. Modularization of projects into modules is a lot easier to deal
with, since there is a model for it. Setting that up in Ant is hard
work for complex projects.


That Said; I recommend Pivot NOT to change to Maven;

1. You are already up and running.
2. You have very few and simple dependencies.
3. You don't have a whole lot of modules.

But;

> 1) Distribute Pivot artifacts via Maven for consumption by other projects

is something you should do, but that is not very hard.


Cheers
-- 
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer
http://www.qi4j.org - New Energy for Java

I  live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er
I  work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc
I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug

Re: maven

[Noel Grandin <no...@gmail.com>]

My 2c

I've been tracking this stuff for a while, and it seems to be getting
quite interesting.

Quite frankly, I think all of the current crop of Java build and
dependency tools suck (Ant and Maven).

But there are some new-comers on the dependency management front like
Apache Ivy,
and on the build front like shmant, leafcutter and gradle that are
looking promising.

Maven is going to take a lot of work - from what I've seen, getting
initial builds up and running is very easy, but making it robust and
reliable is a real PITA.

But it's still the current de-facto standard in the Java world, so if
it makes life easier for consumers of Pivot then it may be a good
idea....

Regards, Noel.

Re: maven

[Sandro Martini <sa...@gmail.com>]

Hi to all,
sometimes i write on maven, but my are ideas, just to discuss with
other Pivot developers and for mid-long term plans, don't worry ...

> 1) Distribute Pivot artifacts via Maven for consumption by other projects
Yes, i think this would help Pivot users to integrate in their
projects, some months ago i tried to convert the Started example to
maven and after this the full projects shrink down to few KB of zip
(stripped out all jars), for example. But i had to install all pivot
jars manually in my repository, and wasn't the best ...
One time we'll have a release i think there is a system to put release
jars in the maven repository, in the right way (asking to someone i
suppose) ...
For this, i could send my samples pom files, if/when needed as a starting point.

> 2) Use Maven to build Pivot itself
I agree with all, until major benefits will come (and someone of us
will become a maven expert i didn't suggest to migrate).

One powerful thing I've seen is the ability to remove all required
jars, and let maven handle all of them, for example i had a
server-side resource to call with a unit test, so i put Jetty as a
requirements (and in the future I'd like to move to Grizzly or other
...), and handle start/stop of all during that unit test, including
the test pivot application.

Another test was to modularize a Pivot Application into modules,
thinking at a mid size application (1 common + 0 .. n modules), and
handling builds, etc., and putting it inside a full JavaEE
Application, to try to identify problems, but was only an experiment
(working but) at beginning ...

But things like this maybe could help in projects other than Pivot
base ... maybe a variant of the Starter (dedicated to maven) could be
a simple test. And this is a sample usage of point 1.

What do you think ?

Best regards,
Sandro

Re: maven

[Greg Brown <gk...@mac.com>]

Agreed. 

To be clear - as I understand it, there are two potential use cases for Maven with respect to Pivot:

1) Distribute Pivot artifacts via Maven for consumption by other projects
2) Use Maven to build Pivot itself

Item #1 has some clear benefits as it will make Pivot more readily available to those developers who do use Maven. Item #2 is questionable since it will involve significant changes to our current build process and the value of making such a change has not yet been substantiated.

On Monday, April 06, 2009, at 10:56AM, "Todd Volkert" <tv...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I for one have not been operating under that assumption and agree with
>all that you say in your email.  I've had [very] little experience
>with Maven on one prior project and thought that it was an awful large
>hammer, but then again, I've heard some other people rave about it, so
>it's probably the standard "use the right tool for the job" story.
>
>-T
>
>On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Christopher Brind <br...@brindy.org.uk> wrote:
>> Unless I've missed something (or maybe I'm reading between the lines) there
>> seems to be an assumption that we're moving to Maven.
>>
>> I've never used Maven, though I do from time to review whether or not it
>> will be useful to me.  So far I haven't seen a use-case where it actually
>> adds benefit (above and beyond anything I can put together in Ant), but
>> that's just in my little world.
>>
>> My understanding is that once you go down the Maven route it is very hard to
>> get out of it if you decide it's not for your project.  It also seems like
>> quite a big dependency to have for building your project.  At the moment all
>> I need is ant and an SVN client.
>>
>> I know there are a lot of Maven fans out there, so I'm open to giving it a
>> chance, but I think we should all be committed to it.
>>
>> So before this project considers moving to Maven I would like to see:
>> - a volunteer to be Maven champion
>> - a list of benefits that it will add to the project
>> - a list of disadvantages
>> - a getting started overview for people working on pivot
>> - a getting started overview for people working with pivot
>> - an overview of how people working on pivot would work day to day
>> - an overview of how people working with pivot would work day to day
>>
>> Then we should vote on it.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Chris
>>
>
>

Re: maven

[Todd Volkert <tv...@gmail.com>]

I for one have not been operating under that assumption and agree with
all that you say in your email.  I've had [very] little experience
with Maven on one prior project and thought that it was an awful large
hammer, but then again, I've heard some other people rave about it, so
it's probably the standard "use the right tool for the job" story.

-T

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Christopher Brind <br...@brindy.org.uk> wrote:
> Unless I've missed something (or maybe I'm reading between the lines) there
> seems to be an assumption that we're moving to Maven.
>
> I've never used Maven, though I do from time to review whether or not it
> will be useful to me.  So far I haven't seen a use-case where it actually
> adds benefit (above and beyond anything I can put together in Ant), but
> that's just in my little world.
>
> My understanding is that once you go down the Maven route it is very hard to
> get out of it if you decide it's not for your project.  It also seems like
> quite a big dependency to have for building your project.  At the moment all
> I need is ant and an SVN client.
>
> I know there are a lot of Maven fans out there, so I'm open to giving it a
> chance, but I think we should all be committed to it.
>
> So before this project considers moving to Maven I would like to see:
> - a volunteer to be Maven champion
> - a list of benefits that it will add to the project
> - a list of disadvantages
> - a getting started overview for people working on pivot
> - a getting started overview for people working with pivot
> - an overview of how people working on pivot would work day to day
> - an overview of how people working with pivot would work day to day
>
> Then we should vote on it.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>