Maven.. jury is still out

We just started a new project that will include a large server component so I thought I'd try out Maven for our build environment instead of the usual ant. I've never been a huge ant fan, but over the years its become familiar, and it has always been easy to extend or tweak to do what you want. The only bad thing is that you have to do it all from scratch (or likely the build.xml from your last project) every time.

Maven has some benefits in this respect. I kind of see Maven as the 'Ruby on Rails' of the build world. It does a lot for you, and makes bootstrapping a project incredibly quick. You can get a sane directory structure, a test runner and compilation going in 60 seconds flat. In Ant that would require a good deal of copying and hacking on your old build file, copying in your test runner etc..

So in that respect, it's pretty awesome. The layout of src and unit tests, resources etc is all sane and things I can live with.

One big things Maven does which is interesting is manage external dependencies. Instead of having a /lib dir checked in with your dependent jars, you now just specify what version of what library you require and Maven takes care of downloading it from the iBiblio repo, adding it to your classpath etc.. This is pretty neat I admit, though I'm a bit uneasy because it reminds me a bit of CPAN which in my experience works fantastic 95% of the time, but the remaining 5% drives you bonkers. Then again, this is Java WORA, so we shouldn't have those issues right? ;)

I'm not sure I buy into the dependency management being a huge win. Yes, it keeps you from having libs checked into SVN, but why is that such a bad thing anyways? Your SVN repository is probably on a server that is very fast for you to access, you are guaranteed it will work, and guaranteed that iBiblio won't one day blow up and leave you running around for your dependent jars.

Then comes all the automagic of Maven. When it works and you are doing something it expects, great. Otherwise.. be prepared for a time sync. I've worked with a lot of tools over the years, and Maven is by far the most obtuse and worst documented among them. Just figuring out how to include my own external jar that didn't exists in iBiblio took the better part of an hour. I can chalk a lot of this up to being new to it, but it is usually easier. I even bought a Maven book, "A Developer's Notebook" and this has to be one of the most useless texts I've ever used. All it focuses on is the common path. There are plenty of discussions of the common path on the web, when I buy books I want to know the details, and this book has none of them.

So so far, I think the jury is still out on Maven. I do appreciate how quick it was to set up a sane build environment for this project. We'll see how things progress as I want to customize the build in the future.