After using Ant and Maven in a professional team environment for years now (although newer to Maven) I was thinking it would be good to offer Ant and Maven as build tool options with seam-gen encore for Seam 3.
For smaller Seam 3 projects, esp. projects that don't share any common libs or infrastructure
b/n multiple projects and thus benefit from hierarchical POM structure/modules, then Ant is a good build tool for quick and dirty
POCs and smaller projects.
I've had so many problems and learning curve is high with Maven.
e.g. yesterday for a RELEASE build we had a problem where in a particular dependency in a child POM Maven was not unable to resolve the version and the mvn clean was failing. Root cause was identified as the <type>ejb</type> XML snippet in the child POM was missing and thus Maven was unable to uniquely identify the dependency. Well, I personally thought that the type would be a pass-thru from parent to child POM just like version is. But guess not, it's probably defaulting to type of jar.
So many other headaches like .m2/repository corruption, etc. as well as problems with using m2eclipse plugin for Maven integration in Eclipse (the plugin is not even 1.0 final yet!) and the list goes on and on.
Yes, there are advantages to Maven in larger projects, but how bout the small ones? And how many current Java EE devs have professional experience with Maven? Is Maven as popular as Ant now?
The answer for speeding up development is archetypes perhaps? But you still need to know how to modify the POMs to achieve certain things like the javarebel-maven-plugin to generate rebel.xml files for your modules, etc. The learning curve is there no matter what.
So what is the possibility of keeping Ant and adding Maven as an option for seam-gen encore???
