Apache Maven

Anyone here using it? Give me your opinions please!

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Thursday, April 15, 2004

It sucks!

Mike Swieton
Thursday, April 15, 2004

What an interesting question!  There are probably more people using Apache than any other webserver.  There is probably nothing that you would want a webserver to do that Apache cannot do.  It is amazingly fast and stable, and runs on a vast array of platforms.

Did you have any more specific questions?

Matt
Thursday, April 15, 2004

He was asking about Maven, not the webserver.

RP
Thursday, April 15, 2004

He's talking about Apache Maven, not Apache the web server, you idiot! Can't you read?!

Maven doesn't suck, it's great!

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Wait, is 'Apache Maven' a thing, or are you looking for someone who knows about Apache (i.e. _an_ Apache maven)?

Matt
Thursday, April 15, 2004

It's a thing, moron! Here's the first sentence of his original post:

"Anyone here using it?"

It, as in a 'thing', not a person, brainiac.

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

And the fact that the first letter is in upper case should hint at something.

RP
Thursday, April 15, 2004

" Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object model (POM) in that all the artifacts produced by Maven are a result of consulting a well defined model for your project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source cross-references are all controlled by your POM."

http://maven.apache.org/

Tapiwa
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Aargh! And all this time I thought people were calling me an expert...

Anon-y-mous Cow-ard
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Once again, another imposter Elephant posting.  The opinions of the previous poster are not necessarily representative of those held by the Elephant that has been posting on JOS for close to a year.

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Hmm, methinks I pissed someone off...

Never used Maven, myself.

Mike Swieton
Thursday, April 15, 2004

I *AM* the real Elephant. The previous message is from an impersonator.

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Somebody give Elephant his medicine.

RP
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Will the real Elephant please stand up?

...
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Hi, my name's Elephant and I whine a lot.

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

I am Spart--I mean, Elephant.

But seriously, I tried to use Maven once and quickly became overwhelmed. But I think that perhaps that was because I was trying to take our existing, somewhat-large project and squish it into Maven. So if you're going to try Maven, I'd recommend trying it first with a new project.

Like most of these frameworkey type things, I've often found that one's like or dislike has more to do with how closely the framework matches "how I would have done it". Moreso than an objective evaluation of strength and weaknesses.

Elephant
Thursday, April 15, 2004

I tried using Maven a while ago and I found it to be more cumbersome than helpful. Doing all config through Text or XML files has never really appealed to me.

Gp
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Maven is *really* nice, providing your project fits their expectations.  Last time I used it, I was restricted to a single source directory which didn't work for me.

However, if you can use it, do.  The automated unit test reports etc. are good.

Koz
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Gee lets invent tools to measure EVERYTHING!!

Once we have everything measured and metric'ed, life will be great, and we'll get productive results, even if our developers are incompetent boobs!!!

Mr Fancypants
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Mr Fancypants , I assume that was directed at my comment?

Firstly, Maven doesn't invent anything, it just glues together a number of widely used tools.

Secondly,  Unit testing & the like are no substitute for qualified, competant developers.  However lots of qualified, competant developers love using unit tests, coverage reports etc.  It's nice to know when someone's check-in broke your application, and it's even nicer to pull that information out of nicely formatted HTML reports rather than stepping back one check in at a time, looking for the first failure.

Koz
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Never used Maven, but Hani (http://www.jroller.com/page/fate) doesn't like it.

genius
Thursday, April 15, 2004

What does Hani like?

Koz
Thursday, April 15, 2004

I'm with Fancypants on this one. Although I haven't looked at Maven, it sounds like the typical crutch of the incompetent.

Instead of concentrating on the real problem, they install some toy with which they can pretend to be making progress. Management doesn't have a clue.

Before too long, familiarity in said toy or set of toys even becomes an important part of the job spec, serving to exclude many excellent professionals. The Indian outsourcers are masters at this, of course.

Tiger
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Maven has a fairly steep learning curve (which I still haven't entirely ascended) but it can be immensely useful. It takes most of the pain out of separating your code into distinct modules that previously you might have done using Ant's pattern matching and makes building libraries/webapps and automatically running tests a declarative breeze. (I wish it didn't use Jelly though, which is a PITA.)

Just because maven performs a lot of actions (reports, website, etc.) doesn't mean you have to use them. For me it's worth it to easily declare dependencies on external libraries and intra-project modules and have those automatically managed for me -- they're archived for recreating later builds, and the correct versions are pulled up to create standalone apps or WAR files. I can add a new module to my project in a just a few minutes.

Gee, that doesn't sound like a "crutch for the incompetent", does it? It's a build system, it works.

Chris Winters
Friday, April 16, 2004

http://jroller.com/page/lsd/20040415#maven
http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/brett/archives/000678_why_do_you_hate_maven.html

genius
Friday, April 16, 2004

  Recent Topics

  Fog Creek Home