Apache Maven

Hello. Does anyone here know anything about Apache Maven? It's supposed to be a watered down version of Ant, but I am not grasping it very well yet. I am creating a multi-module project and it's been very hard to define all the dependencies and build the project. Given the work effort put in so far, I don't know if it's really worth the effort and will provide a good ROI. It's just not making a whole lot of sense to me so far. Anyone can provide some insight, such as their experiences with using it, particularly in the context of a multi-module J2EE EAR project? Any comments or insight is appreciated. Thanks.

Yep.


Not at all.


It's worked great for me so far for that very purpose. What information can I provide to help Maven make more sense to you?

In the meantime, I highly recommend using the following resources:

- The "Getting Help" section of the project site
- The Definitive Guide to Maven

~

I've been using Maven 2 at work for over 2 years now and I think it's all in all good.
Prior to Maven we had a very complicated build configuration with Ant and shell-scripts to build and deploy. Also we had to manually manage dependencies, something that easily gets out of hand with several million lines of code. All that has been solved by Maven in a brilliant way!

The only thing I don't like with Maven is that with many and big projects the build/deploy process takes some time to perform, usually much more than a simple Ant-task that copies class files from Eclipse target-folder would. As a developer, waiting 5 mins for deploy as soon as you've made a tiny change isn't ok. But, like I hinted, this depends greatly on how your project(s) are arranged and intertwined so don't get scared!
We solved the build/deploy wait with Ant, a quick-deploy-script that just copies from target-folder.
After all, it's not against the law to use Ant just because you've choosen Maven

All in all, I would never go back to what we had before. Maven has made my work so much easier! Use Maven!

The biggest difference between Maven and Ant (at least in my mind) is that Ant is relatively easy to understand, but always takes a fair amount of work to produce a working build. It's closer to the metal so to speak.

Maven on the other hand takes more work to understand, but once you get past the learning curve it's almost always easier to use. It's further from the metal so to speak.


And like Andy_SWE, I typically have a Maven build and Ant build in the same project. Often times I have several bash scripts in those projects as well. Typically the further I stray from Maven the more customized the script is for my particular circumstances.

For example, a published project will have a Maven build. But often times I'll also have an Ant script that sets up Maven on a new machine. The idea being that a person can pull down a project from revision control and run an Ant build to get the real build system. Then I often have several bash scripts that takes care of some of my personal housekeeping - those often times aren't even maintained in revision control.