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.

If you use Maven you probably already know that Sun jars were always a problem because their license didn’t allow redistribution. Now with the effort from the Glassfish project Sun is releasing a lot of components under the open source CDDL license. It allows the redistribution so we have started syncing the Maven repository at Java.net managed by the Sun guys, for now only the com.sun.* and javax.* groups and only the official releases.

Today is release day, two things are out, a new version of the Better Builds with Maven book with the errata found to date fixed, and Maestro, open source end-to-end build solution based upon Apache Maven and Continuum that’s
easy to use, fast, and pre-configured for use with a high performance
repository, with commercial support available from Mergere. And yes, both the book and Maestro are free (as in free beer).

Announcements follow for more detail:

If you happen to be in Paris the 11th, from 8:30 to 12:30 there’s a free conference, Maven Day, with three core developers from Maven, Jason van Zyl, Vincent Massol and Emmanuel Venisse.

74/80 rue Roque de Fillol
Puteaux
Mo La D�fense – Esplanade

There’s a page where you can find more Maven events.

Many of the Maven and Spring users out there have complained for looooong time about not having the latest Spring releases in the Maven repository at iBiblio, something that I personally solved every time there was a new release of Spring copying the jars in the repo, ensuring also that they are the official releases as it’s something used for a lot of people.

Then with Maven 2 the problem started to be the poms not being there, so as I like Spring I came with a parallel Maven 2 build that could be added to Spring CVS so we could build it with Maven 2 and thus having the right poms for Spring users. You can find this conversion in the Better Builds with Maven book, Ant to Maven migration chapter. The problem is that as new features are added into Spring, dependencies are updated,… things get out of sync pretty fast. So I kindly requested the Spring guys to add the poms to their CVS (as both Ant and Maven build can coexist) and let the community help improve them. The jira issue is SPR-1484, you can find there the latest poms i’ve been working with, and at spring/lib/readme.txt you can get the versions of dependencies used (although docs are not always up to date). If you want Spring to support the Maven 2 poms and make sure they are always up to date in sync with the releases you can vote for the issue SPR-1484.

Remember that we have now more than 11000 jars in the repo + more than 1500 project sources + more than 700 javadocs! keep doing this great job submitting them!

If you happen to be in San Francisco and are interested in Maven you should check this out, there will be a Maven JUG hosted by Mergere at the W hotel, Tuesday at 7:30. You should register to make sure there’s enough space for everybody.

The official announcement follows: