Re: Maven2 opinions

[Alex Karasulu <ao...@bellsouth.net>]

Hi all,

Noel asked me to post my opinions to this thread as a result of my
recent experiences with m2.  Brace yourselves because I may jump around
in this email :).

I don't even know how to start off.  Perhaps I can say Maven is a double
edged sword for me.  It has been a journey developing ApacheDS with M1
then migrating to M2.  Directory has been completely developed with
Maven since day one.

It made many things easier at first over ant but soon as the number of
project modules increased and we had to do things out of the ordinary we
found that it was just as verbose and sometimes harder to manage.  I
don't have the time to list all the pros and cons but let me generalize
and say this.  For the most simple of cases wrt every aspect of a
project from builds to generating a website maven is great: referring to
maven 2 here specifically (would never touch m1 ever again).  When
things get complicated or out of the ordinary where they do not fall
into a prescribed Maven pattern that's when Maven starts behaving
oddly.  This and how SNAPSHOTs are handled are my greatest peeves.

Also we still have not figured how to get some of the new site doc
generation mechanisms working properly.  Thinking we could use this
doxia stuff for generating xdocs we have stuffed our latest doco into
confluence at safehaus and still have to figure out a way to get that
stuff into our repo now.  It's a bit of a mess which we must solve
soon.  I hope things have come along far enough since my m1-m2
conversion where we can actually use these plugins effectively to
rejuvinate our aging website.

In the end, I feel that maven is a great idea with a poor
implementation.  But then again everyone thinks they can do it better
don't they?  I've begun to suspect that even m2 has issues like the
latest problems I've had with the failing remote repositories.  Maven
just has not been the same since codehaus/maven.org went down.

I've already made the mistake of pushing maven on the pro ant Felix
people and unofficially they're not too happy with that and I feel
responsible.  Not saying you guys should not use maven tho.  However I
think if you have a pre-existing project built on ant and you're
comfortable I'd stick with that.  If you're starting a new project and
need to get things up and running fast maven goes a long way.

Sorry for not giving more concrete examples, also I hope my love hate
afair does not offend any of my good maven friends.  I'd probably be
complaining and loving Ant just as much if that's what I was using today.

Alex




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