I submit to our Maven overlords

[timfox]

I never thought this day would come, I tried to fight so hard in the midst of adversity.

I did my bit for the cause - trying to hold high the bright light of ant/buildmagic against the dark forces of Maven.

Those now familiar forces that have so cruelly infiltrated our community with their dirty habits; subverting once proud developers in sneaky and nefarious ways, crushing their spirits and discarding their empty shells.

But alas, the pressure is too much, with a heavy heart I raise my white flag and kneel prostrate at the altar of Maven, my soul crushed, and with bitter regret in my heart, I finally realise we must ask the question "Is it time to move our build system to Maven"?

Comments please.

[jmesnil]

so, it's true... hell has finally frozen... so sad...
To quote Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that maven was the best tool to build software"

I welcome the quantic results of maven builds (sometimes OK, sometimes FAIL, sometimes ELSE)

On one hand, moving to Maven will help us be better integrated with other projects (and let people integrate JBM more easily) and we'll leverage JBoss efforts around Maven (e.g. docs generated by maven looks nicer)
On the other hand, Maven is one of the few software I really hate to use (poor doc, download half the internet to compile a class, incompatible versions, etc.)

Dear Ant, I'll miss ya...

[gaohoward]

:D

I'm more familiar with Ant and I like it. It's a big improvement if compared with older *make utilities. It has every thing i need to build a project (maybe a little more than i need, but that's fine to have a little margin). I use ant much the way as I use a programming language. It's flexible and extensible and manageable, as long as you use it wisely.

I'm scared of maven because it looks like so obscure in its way of working. On first sight, it is much simpler in its usage. But it is a false lure in my opinion.

Probably I know maven not so much so my opinion is not fair for maven. But unless maven becomes mandate in the projects I'm working on, I'll stick to ant as long as possible.

[timfox]

"gaohoward" wrote:

Probably I know maven not so much so my opinion is not fair for maven. But unless maven becomes mandate in the projects I'm working on, I'll stick to ant as long as possible.

+1

I think for the JBM 1.x work we should stick with ant, but just move to Maven for the new 2.0 stuff.

[ataylor]

I actually don't mind maven when it comes to thirdparty dependencies. You have finer grained control over what you want. i.e., with buildmagic if someone wants to use JBM all the jars are downloaded when maybe they only want the client jars. Also its download only once for every project which i like.

Also theres nothing to stop us using ant to build and call maven just for the dependencies, thats what the AS build does.

+1 with jbm 2 only.

[clebert.suconic]

"ataylor" wrote:
I actually don't mind maven when it comes to thirdparty dependencies. You have finer grained control over what you want. i.e., with buildmagic if someone wants to use JBM all the jars are downloaded when maybe they only want the client jars. Also its download only once for every project which i like.

Also theres nothing to stop us using ant to build and call maven just for the dependencies, thats what the AS build does.

+1 with jbm 2 only.

I like that idea also. Paul Gier has a guide somewhere on how to do that.

I found it a bit hacky to use it at first, but after it' s ready it' s easy to maintain.


(I'm not volunteering though... I know 0 about Maven :-).... and I would prefer keep that way :-P )