Why does Maven have such a bad rep? [closed]

Answer 1

Too much magic.

Answer 2

Some of my pet peeves with Maven:

• The XML definition is super clumsy and verbose. Have they never heard of attributes?

• In its default configuration, it always scours the 'net on every operation. Regardless of whether this is useful for anything, it looks extremely silly to need Internet access for "clean".

• Again in the default, if I'm not careful to specify exact version numbers, it will pull the very latest updates off the 'net, regardless of whether these newest versions introduce dependency errors. In other words, you're placed at the mercy of other peoples' dependency management.

• The solution to all this network access is to turn it off by adding the -o option. But you have to remember to turn it off if you really want to do dependency updating!

• Another solution is to install your own "source control" server for dependencies. Surprise: Most projects already have source control, only that works with no additional setup!

• Maven builds are incredibly slow. Fiddling with network updates alleviates this, but Maven builds are still slow. And horribly verbose.

• The Maven plugin (M2Eclipse) integrates most poorly with Eclipse. Eclipse integrates reasonably smoothly with version control software and with Ant. Maven integration is very clunky and ugly by comparison. Did I mention slow?

• Maven continues to be buggy. Error messages are unhelpful. Too many developers are suffering from this.

Answer 3

My experience echos the frustration of many of the posts here. The problem with Maven is that it wraps and hides the details of build management in its quest for ultimate automagical goodness. This makes you nearly helpless if it breaks.

My experience is that any problem with maven quickly degenerated into a multi-hour snipe hunt through webs of nested xml files, in an experience similar to root canal.

I've also worked in shops that relied heavily on Maven, the people who liked it (who liked it for the "push a button, get it all done" aspect) didn't understand it. The maven builds had a million automatic targets, which I'm sure would be useful if I felt like taking the hours to read through what they did. Better 2 targets that work that you fully understand.

caveat : last worked with Maven 2 years ago, it may be better now.

Answer 4

It deserves the reputation it has got. Not everyone needs the rigid structure that Maven's developers thought is appropriate for every single project. It is so inflexible. And what is 'Pro' for many people, the dependency management, is IMHO its biggest 'con'. I am absolutely not comfortable with maven downloading the jars from the network and lose my sleep over incompatibilities (yea, the offline mode exists, but then why should I have all those hundreds of xml files and checksums). I decide which libraries I use and many projects have serious concerns about builds dependant on network connection.

Further worse, when things do not work, you are absolutely lost. The documentation sucks, the community is clueless.

Answer 5

It's more complicated than the language you used to write your project. Getting it configured right is harder than actual programming.

Answer 6

I think it has a bad reputation with people who have the most simple and the most complicated projects.

If you're building a single WAR from a single codebase it forces you to move your project structure around and manually list the two of three jars into the POM file.

If you're building one EAR from a set of nine EAR file prototypes with some combination of five WAR files, three EJBs and 17 other tools, dependency jars and configurations that require tweaking MANIFEST.MF and XML files in existing resources during final build; then Maven is likely too restricting. Such a project becomes a mess of complicated nested profiles, properties files and misuse of the Maven build goals and Classifier designation.

So if you're in the bottom 10% of the complexity curve, its overkill. At the top 10% of that curve, you're in a straitjacket.

Maven's growth is because it works well for the middle 80%