users@jersey.java.net

Re: On Maven 2

From: Farrukh Najmi <farrukh_at_wellfleetsoftware.com>
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:43:02 -0500

Marc Hadley wrote:
> On Dec 7, 2007, at 9:47 AM, Farrukh Najmi wrote:
>>
>> It took ~2 weeks of work or less for wadl project and worked out very
>> smoothly. Marc, please share you perceptions on that move. Thanks.
>>
> I think it went pretty smoothly. We created a branch and did all the
> build-related modification there to avoid any disruption to trunk.
> Once everything was building smoothly we merged the changes back to
> trunk.
>
> Personally I still find Maven a little cryptic/arcane, I think that's
> partly due to my being so used to the Ant way of doing things and
> partly a result of everything in Maven being done by plug-ins. I'm
> hoping time will breed familiarity.

I went through a more extreme conversion from a period of severe
ant-maven feeelings (based on maven 1 and largely out of not
understanding what value it provided other than seeming complexity) to
minor appreciation (again based on maven 1 and slightly better
appreciation of only a small subset of value) to total amazement (after
getting much better understanding of its value). I am still completely
awed by finding new maven plugins and how they solve time consuming
problem within minutes. The most recent example of that was when Wilfred
used the http://mojo.codehaus.org/appassembler/appassembler-maven-plugin
in wadl project to automatically generate shell scripts for running wadl
compiler. That kind of crappy stuff took forever in my past projects.

After a while one realizes that there is a pattern to everything in
maven and the pattern is based on standard conventions. Some good
resources for learning maven are:

<http://www.devzuz.com/web/guest/products/resources#BBWM>
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/The+Maven+2+tutorial (have
not tried myself yet)

-- 
Regards,
Farrukh Najmi
Web: http://www.wellfleetsoftware.com