Maven JUG at JavaOne, plus free beer

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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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:

 

Please join Mergere for a Java Users Group (JUG) hosted by our parent company, Simula Labs, with IBM and IONA Technologies.

This is your opportunity to hear presentations from and meet with the teams behind some of the most innovative and popular Apache open source projects today.

See how the Mergere Maestro distribution, based on Apache Maven and Continuum, provides an agile platform to build, test and manage SOA run-times, like IONA Technnologies~ Celtix. Also learn how LogicBlaze FUSE for WAS CE is an ideal middleware platform for enterprise Service-oriented Architecture (SOA).

PLUS, for early JavaOne attendees ~ see Maven founder and Chief Architect of Mergere, Jason van Zyl, speak a the closing keynote of Netbeans Day on Monday, May 15. For more information on this event, please go to: http://www.netbeans.org/community/articles/javaone/2006/nb-day.html

What: Java Users Group

When: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Where: The W Hotel, San Francisco
181 3rd Street
San Francisco, California 94103
(415) 777-5300
Great Room 1&2

Who: Speakers from Mergere, Simula, LogicBlaze, IBM and Iona Technologies

FREE beverages and appetizers will be served

Limited space is available ~ click the URL below to REGISTER NOW for Mergere’s JUG!

http://www.mergere.com/common/reg.jsp?form_source=m-jug_javaone2006&form_landing=m-jug_email

Heading to San Francisco

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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Tomorrow I’ll fly to San Francisco and I’ll be around for the next week, going to JavaOne and parties (mostly the latest) and meeting people from the mailing lists and different OS projects in person.

If you wanna meet me memorize my picture at the upper right corner of this weblog ;). If it’s not enough don’t be shy and drop me an email or ask for me at the Mergere booth.

Sun jars available in Maven repo

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
3

Kohsuke has uploaded Activation 1.1 and JavaMail 1.4 to the Maven 1 repository in java.net.

I uploaded them to the Maven 2 repo at iBiblio, improving the poms: activation and javamail, if you want to use them you can add one of the following dependencies to your pom. You only need one because javamail depends on activation and brings it in.

<dependency>
  <groupid>javax.activation</groupid>
  <artifactid>activation</artifactid>
  <version>1.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupid>javax.mail</groupid>
  <artifactid>mail</artifactid>
  <version>1.4</version>
</dependency>

Make sure your project uses these versions so your users don’t need to download the jars from Sun.

Optional dependencies in Maven

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
2

Colin Sampaleanu (Spring Framework, Interface21) brought again the topic about how to handle optional dependencies in Maven, what’s the best way, how to apply it,… You can read the thread How are people getting around the lack of custom scopes?. If you are too lazy and don’t want to reason you can skip to the end where you can find the solution for that problem under Maven 2.

The example he provides is Spring Webflow, currently packaged completely in an only jar, with some core dependencies always needed, some only needed when used with Spring MVC, some only with JSF, and some only with Struts.

While the idea of packaging a bunch of classes in one jar can be handy when you copy it manually I see more cons than pros:

  • Almost everybody uses a tool that will deal with several jars with no problems
  • Build time checking. If you include more classes than expected nothing prevents their use. This is a huge source of problems. My experience tells me that policies that can’t be enforced don’t succeed.
  • Component Oriented design, if you find yourself including many dependencies in your pom is like importing a lot of stuff in a java class, not a great idea.
  • With a transitive dependency tool like Maven you won’t need to add more than a few dependencies, eg depending on spring-hibernate3 automatically adds for you spring-core, spring-beans, spring-aop,…
  • In fact the Spring guys gave a step in this direction in 2.0, splitting spring-hibernate (depending on hibernate 2 and 3) into spring-hibernate2 and spring-hibernate3, or spring-orm in different jars for each ORM implementation (JDO, Toplink,…)

Here you can see as example some of the problems that I found thanks to
Maven in the Spring Framework build, that can be found in the chapter Converting existing Ant builds in the book Better Buils With Maven, that I filed in the Spring Framework issue tracker.

It’s also worth to say that Acegi Security System for Spring has been building happily with Maven 1 for far more than a year and now is switching to Maven 2. Spring Rich Client is also building now with Maven 2.

If you still are not convinced about splitting your jars in small components based on your use cases (bad for you), here is the work around in Maven:

  • Create a pom for your whole jar (spring-webflow), with all but core dependencies tagged as optional. You can build the jar with this pom.
  • Create a pom for each of the configurations, setting packaging as pom, eg spring-webflow-spring-webmvc, spring-webflow-struts, spring-webflow-jsf
  • To that poms add a dependency in spring-webflow and the required deps for that configuration
    • spring-webflow-spring-webmvc -> spring-webflow, spring-webmvc
    • spring-webflow-struts -> spring-webflow, struts
    • spring-webflow-jsf -> spring-webflow, jsf
  • In your application now you can depend on any of the projects in point #2 setting type to pom inside the dependency tag.

Hope you choose the right way and don’t go into the dark side 😉

Quieres ganar 4500 dolares por un trabajillo de verano?

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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No es broma, si eres estudiante Google te puede pagar 4500 d�lares, seleccionando una de las propuestas de un projecto open source y apunt�ndote a Google Summer of Code, y si superas el proceso de selecci�n durante el verano Google te paga.

He a�adido unas propuestas a la p�gina de la fundaci�n Apache, que me interesan especialmente, relacionadas con Maven, aunque tambi�n se aceptan las propuestas de estudiantes. Lee las preguntas frecuentes en la p�gina de Google y date prisa que se acaba pronto!

Adem�s tras esta experiencia est� la muy probable posibilidad de trabajar para compa��as relacionadas proyecto open source, al menos es el primer lugar donde yo voy a mirar por nueva gente. No es una mala forma de hacer el proyecto de fin de carrera, o la tesis, y conseguir una experiencia que te ayudar� a conseguir un mejor trabajo y reconocido a nivel mundial.

Google Summer of Code – 4500$ for a summer job

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
1

Are you student? interestend in getting paid 4500$ for a summer job?

Join Google Summer of Code, 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. Be sure to read the FAQ and hurry, it ends soon!

Better Builds with Maven – 5000 downloads

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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We’ve reached already the 5000 dowloads since the book was released officially, which was less than two days ago!

Disabled jroller comments, using haloscan from now on

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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Just to let you know that I have disabled the jroller comments and added links to haloscan, another way to write comments, because I always had problems not being emailed new comments and a lot of spam.

Old comments are still available through the permalinks.

UPDATE: I finally got a way to see the comments in roller, waiting for the send email when new comments are added feature works

Better Builds With Maven – Free book about Maven 2

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
6

It finally went out! As I mentioned some weeks ago, there is a book about Maven 2 made by core developers, John Casey, Vincent Massol, Brett Porter, Jason Van Zyl, and myself. I think this is what the Maven community was waiting for, and I’d like to thank Mergere for the opportunity of working on it and the guts to make it available for FREE, like in free beer ;).

You can download Better Builds With Maven, and the chapters code (link is at top left corner).

Better Builds With Maven

I’d prefer a cover like this, but it didn’t pass the vote, nobody understands my sense of humor 😉

Leaning Tower of Pisa

Beware of unofficial Maven repositories

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
1

I have seen some projects that use their own Maven repository where they copy stuff from iBiblio and change it based in their needs, like changing pom dependencies. You should know that this is a really bad practice, let’s see

  • if you happen to get that pom from ibiblio first for any of your other projects, Maven won’t get the one from that custom repo, as it’s already cached, and there’s no reason to redownload again
  • if you happen to run first against that custom repo, that custom pom will get downloaded to your cache, thus preventing all the other projects to use the right pom from iBiblio

To sum up, if you need to use your own repo you have to create your own groupId (com.acme) and deploy there all your stuff as other people’s stuff that you customize