Archive for the ‘maven’ Category

Maven-eclipse-plugin woes fixed

Friday, May 29th, 2009

There is quite some anti-mavenism going around, about plugins suddenly not working, etc. And often this is true, case in point: maven-eclipse-plugin version 2.6 botched all projects working with Wicket by being very anal about what should live in the src/main/java directory tree (only Java files! God forbid you’d like to put web resources such as .properties (i18n for your web components), .js, .css, .html, etc next to your Java files. This version not only broke Wicket projects, but AspectJ as well.

Fortunately, the Maven community (more specifically Barrie Treloar and Arnaud Heritier) were helpful in finding the root cause of our pain: a conflict in merging the resources paths during the classpath generation.

With the latest snapshot of maven-eclipse-plugin 2.7 we now have our old build stability back, and can enjoy the new features of the maven-eclipse-plugin, such as searching your workspace for projects that are snapshot dependencies, and adding a project link instead of a jar dependency.

Yes, maven can sometimes be a pain, but ultimately with a great supporting and responsive community it will deliver. Many thanks to Barrie and Arnaud for being patient with us.

Downloading the internet with Maven in a new light

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I have my share of complaints like everybody else about Apache Maven and one of them is that upon installation (or upgrading to a new plugin version) it starts downloading half of the available internet. Maven is constructed in a highly modular fashion, requiring lots of different, small, focused Java libraries. I’d like the distribution to contain those libraries, but I digress. Tonight I saw that not only Maven is structured this way. It is something *all* open source projects got.

For example, the much touted Ruby on Rails project with their disdain for everything Java would probably cringe at Maven (it uses XML after all). But installing Ruby on Rails and for example Radiant CMS with some plugins is a futile attempt in finding the right invocations of: script/*, rake, gem, port and other commandline tools you’ll want to get familiar with. All these tools start downloading stuff from the internet from different repositories (SVN, ruby forge, etc).

Maven: you’re not alone anymore in downloading the internet for your builds…

m2eclipse is useless

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I’ve installed Subversive as my Eclipse subversion connector, and don’t like Subclipse for one bit (having to update after a commit is weird for a workflow). The decision of m2eclipse to hardcode a dependency on Subclipse baffles me. Now nobody is able to use m2eclipse with git, cvs or any other SCM. This renders the m2eclipse support complete and utterly useless. Fail.

Life’s like a box of chocolates: maven 2.0.5 released

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

It seems that around Valentine’s day and carnival the Java open source community is very generous with sending gifts to the general public: first Wicket 1.2.5 saw the light, and now we can reap the benefits of months of ploughing through issues by the Maven team.

The Maven project released the long awaited Maven 2.0.5. Congratulations and celebrations.

The Tao of naming maven plugins: a tautologists perspective

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

If you have thought that the Maven project was overly complicated, then consider their struggles in naming plugins and discussing their lifecycle. I found these messages in my inbox whilst browsing the Maven mailinglist archives.

maven-maven-plugin, maven-plugin-plugin, release release plugin