Maven

[marrotte]

I'm looking for a Java project managment / collaboration tool and ran across Maven. Can anyone tell me their experience using Maven on Java, Spring, Struts, or any other projects?

Thanks,

--Mike Marrotte

[Ben Alex]

Maven receives a lot of flack, but it works just fine once you get your head around it. My biggest tip is don't use multiprojects if you can avoid it, as there are property inheritence issues with Maven versions up to and including 1.0.2.

We recently migrated Acegi Security to use Maven, and it works just fine. We have some more unusual (though not unheard of) requirements, like JAR signing and DocBook generation. We now receive identical results from Ant or Maven, and deleted the Ant build entirely. You can try out building and see for yourself by viewing the "building" page at http://acegisecurity.sourceforge.net

Acegi Technology also uses Maven for our own projects. I personally quite like it, as it's nice having CVS free of JARs.

[carlos]

Maven provides many tasks out of the box and achieves project build standarization.

I suggest you to take a look at Acegi Security System for Spring or ONess for a more complex project.

[jbetancourt]

For even small projects Maven may have an advantage too. Not only can it create the skeleton of the project it can easily create a usable (if not perfect) site for it. All this with no coding.

What I like best though is the external dependency storage. But, this can be done with Ant too.

What it lacks is an Eclipse plug-in that one can manipulate the POM and other things (have not tried the alpha level one out there). docs are better but still not there yet.

[Ben Alex]

I use and quite like the Eclipse plugin you can download from this update site: http://mevenide.codehaus.org/release...pdate/site.xml

[cameron101]

Would it make sense for the authors of OSS to manufacture POM's and upload POM's / jars to Ibibio as new releases become available? How many people out there are attempting to do this (locally), and incorrectly specifying the POM dependencies or missing out jars in a multi-module environment. For example spring-mock appears to missing from Spring 1.2.5 @ Ibibio

[cameron101]

looks like Spring favours Ivy see:http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_...oellath.org%3e

[Ben Alex]

Colin and I are co-presenting training in New York right now, and this exact question came up. Truth is there are pros and cons to both products and you are unlikely to encounter fundamental limitations with either of them. Colin still prefers Ivy, and I still prefer Maven 2. :-)