This year I volunteered again to be a mentor in Google
Summer of Code at Apache. It’s 4500$ for students that develop a summer project.

Choose one of the proposals (or propose yourself) from any open
source project, and apply. I’ve added some proposals about Maven I’m
interested in to the Apache
Software Foundation list of projects.

• Maven
  Dependency Graphing Tool: Using an existing graphing tool like
  Prefuse, make a graph of
  dependencies for any project, with all the dependencies and
  visualizing as much iformation as possible (transitive dependencies,
  excluded dependencies, version conflict resolution, …). Resources:
  Grafo,
  Graphview
  example, Radialgraphview
  example

• Maven
  OSGi Integration: Improve OSGi support in Maven, generation of
  OSGi manifest by default, improve eclipse compiler integration to
  use bundle manifests, … Resources: Felix
  Bundle plugin, Felix
  Bundle plugin code in Maven sandbox, Maven
  Eclipse compiler

Now, time to work in 2.0.6 and 2.1 😉

The Apache Maven team would like to announce the release of Maven 2.0.5.

Maven 2.0.5 is available for download.

Maven
is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the
concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s
build, reporting and documentation from a central place.

The core release is independent of the plugins available. Further releases of plugins will be made separately. See Plugin List for more information.

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

• the web site: http://maven.apache.org/
• the maven-user mailing list: http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html

For news and information, see:

• Maven Blogs: http://blogs.maven.org/

It has been a long time since last entry, lots of things happened
since, I’ll try to post more often… promise!

What I’m working on right now is OSGi and Maven integration. Goal:
to generate automatically OSGi compliant jars from Maven projects and
vice versa, and make the Maven Repository also a OSGi bundle
repository.

You can take a look at the Maven
repository that contains Eclipse OSGi bundles, with poms
generated from the manifest information and the Felix
Maven bundle plugin that I’m improving to make everything more
automated and better integrated.

I wasn’t at The
Spring Experience, but reading other people’s weblogs I decided
to put here some extracts from the conference about Maven.

Here are some quotes:

Matt Raible in [TSE]
Hop into Real Object Oriented (ROO) with Ben Alex

Matt Raible in [TSE]
Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

Rick Hightower in Random
thoughts about my Spring Experience and Predictions for 2007

There were some questions
in the mailing list and Matt
Raible blog about using Selenium
with Maven 2.

These are the available solutions:

• selenium-maven-plugin,
  we use it for Continuum
  integration tests, it’s a good example of use in a multimodule
  webapp.

• mavenium,
  by David Santiago Turi�o

• none of the above, as Shale
  does with a combination of Dependency and Antrun plugins or as
  Binil
  Thomas explains.

Hopefully the two plugins will merge and we have better Selenium
support

If you are still using Maven 1 you may have found that the repository is not working and Maven is unable to download new dependencies. The reason is that the ibiblio guys have moved the repo to another machine and Maven 1.0.x can’t handle redirects across different host names.

The workaround is to use the mirror configuration until ibiblio fixes the problem. Add to yor project.properties

maven.repo.remote=http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/maven

Although you should probably be using Maven 2 😉

Update! If you want to point to the main repo you should use the following, although it’s always a good idea to use a mirror

maven.repo.remote=http://repo1.maven.org/maven

A common question is how can I proxy a Maven repo in my company so all developers don’t need to go out to the internet to download the same thing over and over, and having a place to put the internal private artifacts.

The answer is easier than ever. Use Archiva, it has a proxy, webdav accessible repository, search, reports,… It hasn’t been released in Apache yet but you can get a built version by downloading Mergere Maestro (don’t worry it’s open source).

You just need to add in your ~/.m2/settings.xml

Today’s picture from my Paris trip, the pyramid of Le Louvre (a scar on the face of Paris as some people say 😉 ), more pictures in flickr.

It’s always interesting to see what your work looks from the outside, from the view of that people that you don’t know, not biased from your relationship.

I was reading  Sylvain Wallez Spring switching to Maven entry, where he exposes that Maven is too much black magic for him and prefers Ant. I think there’s a common basic mistake in his explanation, and I have already seen it in other places. If you are already an Ant user, of course it will look crystal clear after the years you have spent learning it, your opinion is also biased (not that I’m saying my opinion is not biased, that of course it is).

When talking about Ant you should also think about that first time user, that junior developer that haven’t left the IDE, and tell him that it’s easier to use Ant than Maven.

That’s right, read Ben Hale blog entry. Now you don’t have any excuse not to use Maven 😉

In an unrelated note, if you want to have real fun, watch JavaPolis commercial.