Hi Q,
This week I have read a very interesting article called "Investing in
Software Build Infrastructure with Maven" [1] and talks about Maven,
Ant, Eclipse and build infrastructure.
I think convention over configuration and dependency management is a
very handy feature. Of course, it could not be enough to make someone
change his mind about the build infrastructure.
So, I'll talk about how we used to operate here in our company. We used
WOLips with Ant since it was developed for Eclipse 2.1 (more than 3
years ago). We didn't have a large team of developers. However, if more
than one developer had to work together, we had a problem. The classpath
was not valid for everybody or one developer didn't have the Jar for a
dependency. With Maven this problem doesn't happen anymore.
We also used to use a version control system. We had a centralized
repository; we used to do commits, updates and more. Occasionally, we
used to do some tags too. In fact, we didn't have a real version
control. It was not easy, i.e., to build a specific version different
from the trunk. With Maven we have tags for each version on SVN and each
version is build (as a jar, war or tgz in the case of WebObjects) into
our local repository. If someone needs an old version just change the
version in the project's POM.
Did I mention how much time we spent to successfully deploy an
application? Deploy is not automated by maven-wolifecycle-plugin yet,
but we are working in that direction. :) Anyway, now is much easier to
deploy than used to be before.
In fact, you could tell us we can do all this work using Ant and Eclipse
and you are absolutely right. But I tell you that now, using Maven, we
are not wasting time with manual and error prone tasks. And the better
thing, we have to configure almost nothing. We have a parent POM with
the basic configuration and we share it with every project.
If you think you don't have any of the difficult described above, Maven
will only be a new problem for you. But if you have the feeling that the
problems described are similar to yours, Maven could be a very useful tool.
[1]http://meopedia.com/en/InvestingInInfrastructure
Cheers,
Henrique
Q wrote:
> Ok, I understand how ant plays with woproject, wolips and WO development
> in general, but I have not yet explored the utility of using maven in
> any depth, but I feel that from what I have heard about it in the past,
> it's something I should at least explore to some degree.
>
> I have briefly looked at the maven documentation, and the woproject
> maven documentation, and they cover HOW to use maven, and set it up, but
> one thing that is not immediately clear to someone who is not yet
> familiar with maven, is WHY I should consider using maven at all? It's
> fine to say maven makes things easy, uses standard conventions, is fun
> or whatever, but ant does a pretty decent job, so I am curious where the
> benefits lie.
>
> Is using maven for WO development a solution worth considering over
> using Ant, or is it simply a different way of doing the same thing? Are
> there any compelling reasons why one should invest the time to learn to
> use maven?
>
>
> --
>
> Seeya...Q
>
>
> Quinton Dolan - qdola..mail.com <mailto:qdolan@gmail.com>
>
> Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
>
> Ph: +61 419 729 806
>
>
>
--\o/ Henrique Prange, Moleque de Idéias Educação e Tecnologia Ltda | Phone: 55-21-2710-0178 E-mail: hprang..oleque.com.br / \ http://www.moleque.com.br
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