In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to run maven 2, continuum, fedora core 3, IBM JDK 1.4, etc. on an obsolete laptop (Toshiba satelite pro 4200). I use this 4 year old laptop mainly because of the following reasons:

  • I have trouble letting hardware go unused
  • Wicket needs a continuous integration machine
  • I want to test maven 2, but don't want to do this on my own boxes, it might break stuff
  • I heard from co-workers that the IBM JDK is faster on Linux than the Sun JDK
  • I like a challenge
  • more things I can't think of right now

After downloading the maven 2 distribution, I unzipped the archive in my home directory and chmod +x */bin/m2 made sure that the m2 script is executable. I also made sure $JAVA_HOME is set to my IBM JDK installation (for some reason in /opt :-S).

According to the maven 2 website, I can issue m2 --version in order to verify the installation:

[dashorst@localhost maven2-test]$ ~/maven-2.0-alpha-1/bin/m2 --version
Maven version: 2.0-alpha-1

So far so good... Next in the getting started guide is creating your own project:

m2 archetype:create -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app

Alas, this doesn't work, as apparently, a transitive dependency cannot be resolved, as it isn't in the ibiblio repository... It appears to be the velocity 1.4 pom (to be found in your local repository, most probably in a subdir called .m2/repository in your home directory). Removing this dependency from the velocity 1.4 pom made sure the project generation works. Now I have my first Maven 2 project!

First findings:

  • I don't find it particularly fast, but that can be attributed to several factors: slow laptop (very likely, slow operating system (not likely), slow JDK (possibility)
  • I don't like the fact I need to download some (unknown!) jdbc jar, or edit the velocity pom in order to pass the 'getting started'
  • The current structure is still a blur to me, I don't know how to run the unittests

As my experience with maven 2 will grown, this blog will be filled with more findings on this subject! Keep posted...