The next alpha release of maven 2 is now ready. I’ve tried it
with

very good impressions, things are going the right way. The main
problem

is the wrong and missing information (POMs) about the jars in the

repository, but it’s getting better, and will improve faster as soon
as

more people use it.

In the other hand I’m using maven 1.1 beta 1 and the only
problem I’ve found was MAVEN-1625

when trying to install a plugin in the repository. Seems that the

memory usage was greatly improved and some odd problems with jelly are

fixed.

The Apache Maven team is pleased to announce the release of Maven 1.1-beta-1

http://maven.apache.org/start/download.html

Maven is a project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is
based on the concept of a project object model: builds, documentation
creation, site publication, and distribution publication are all
controlled from the project object model. Maven also provides tools to
create source metrics, change logs based directly on source repository,
and source cross-references.

This release focuses on the following objectives:

   * Integration of Maven 2 technologies such as Maven Wagon, Maven SCM
and the new model code
   * Ant 1.6.5 support
   * Upgrade to later releases of dependencies, in particular Jelly
   * Significant improvements in memory usage
   * Improved POM layout
   * Bugfixes

With just a few exceptions [1], Maven 1.1 is backwards compatible with
Maven 1.0.

For a full list of changes, please see JIRA [2].

*IMPORTANT: * You must ensure that Maven 1.1 is first in your path if
you want to have it installed side-by-side with Maven 1.0.2

We hope you enjoy using Maven! If you have any questions, please consult:

   * the FAQ: http://maven.apache.org/faq.html
   * the maven-user mailing list: http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html

For news and information, see:

   * Maven Blogs: http://www.mavenblogs.com/
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D(["mb","

– The Apache Maven Team

[1] http://maven.apache.org/reference/backwards-compatibility.html
[2]
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=11371&styleName=Html&projectId=10030&Create=Create

“,0]
);
D([“ce”]);
D([“ms”,”c76a”]
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//–>

– The Apache Maven Team

[1] http://maven.apache.org/reference/backwards-compatibility.html
[2]
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=11371&styleName=Html&projectId=10030&Create=Create

Brett has released the Maven 2.0 Alpha 2 version, thanks!

Download

Maven 2 site

Brett Porter has posted a set of very interesting slides about Maven 2.0 and Continuum

https://sydneyjug.dev.java.net/files/documents/922/15554/sjug20050601.pdf

There was some interesting discussion lately about Ivy. It started with Colin’s blog entry about Ivy and transitive dependencies.

I think that if you decide to use Ant you’d better use something like Ivy to manage the dependencies in a painless way. If you choose maven just for handling dependencies you may prefer using Ant + Ivy, maven is not about just handling jars, I’d like to think that it’s more than that. As Dion I have to stand up for Maven too. It provides me more productivity than Ant.

You may agree or not but something I find really annoying is people trying to reinvent the wheel. Ivy uses the Maven repository at iBiblio and that’s great, we can collaborate to get a better repository BUT Brett is right about the new Ivy repository with dependency metadata, maven project info is already available under the groupId/poms dir and can be used from Ivy, better improve it than starting from scratch, isn’t it?

I’d like to say that some problem I usually find with that dependency metadata is that projects don’t spend a bit of its time to provide it, I don’t force them to do so just to please me, but many people rant about maven because it doesn’t handle dependency information and they should complain to each project developers, not maven.

N.B. A good idea would be an XSL to pretty print the info from the POM.

I expect that the new maven book written by Vincent Massol will proselytize more users 😉 and more importantly developers!

Today the official Maven repository at iBiblio has reached the 7000 jars. Thanks to everybody who helped to make this happen!

I hope that non maven users also benefit from it, remember that there’s a searching engine at maven.ozacc.com

While coding with JDBC directly provides powerful posibilities I
think no one could argue that it’s better coding at such low level in
the vast majority of the cases.

I think Maven does the same to
build systems. Maven doesn’t substitute Ant, abstracts and simplifies
it. For some cases you’ll still need to write Ant build files inside
Maven, as you can write SQL inside hibernate, but you will have the
power from both worlds.

Maven has made a risky bet, as Hibernate
has done, but fortunately both achieved a growing community. Currently
there are too much people asking for features compared to those
implementing them, so I encourage any of you to take the bull by the
horns and become actively involved.

And you should never forget
that behind high level tools and technologies there’re always low level
ones (Maven – Ant, Hibernate – JDBC, Struts – Servlets,…)

For those Maven haters out there there are five features that they must
love. Sure they may not like the implementation, but it can be
improved, the most important thing is the idea.

• Automatic downloading of dependencies.
• A consistent and standarized directory layout
• A consistent naming of goals (targets): war, jar, javadoc,…
• AOP like chain of goals (before invocation and after invocation pointcuts)
• A declarative descriptor of dependencies and project settings

They can be implemented using Ant, but why reinvent the wheel?

Many people say that Maven is more difficult to use than Ant, I just don’t agree.

I don’t agree that Maven learning curve is steeper than Ant, the fact is that many people already know Ant, but for newbies Maven hides all the low level stuff and can focus in what they want to do instead of how to do it. It’s a kind of declarative (maven) vs procedural (ant) point of view. You only need to create scripts if you want to customize your building, and you can use ant for that.

And remember! Maven is not only about automatic dependency downloading and a beautiful autogenerated site, but also project build standarization (standards are good, aren’t they?)

While the CVS version of the maven sdocbook plugin already does it, if you want to generate xhtml instead of html with the latest 1.4.1 release, you only need to set the following properties (e.g. to project.properties).

maven.sdocbook.html.xsl=${maven.sdocbook.stylesheets.dir}/xhtml/docbook.xsl
maven.sdocbook.htmlchunk.xsl=${maven.sdocbook.stylesheets.dir}/xhtml/chunk.xsl