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

Answer 1

To me, there are as many pros as there are cons to using maven vs ant for in-house projects. For open source projects however, I think Maven has had a great impact in making many projects much easier to build. It wasn't too long ago that it took hours get the average OSS Java (ant based) project to compile, having to set a ton of variables, downloading dependent projects, etc.

You can do anything with Maven you can do with Ant, but where Ant doesn't encourage any standards, Maven strongly suggests you to follow it's structure, or it'll be more work. True, some things are a pain to set up with Maven that would be easy to do with Ant, but the end result is almost always something that is easier to build from the perspective of people who just want to check out a project and go.

Answer 2

I looked into maven about six months ago. We were starting a new project, and didn't have any legacy to support. That said:

• Maven is all-or-nothing. Or at least as far as I could tell from the documentation. You can't easily use maven as a drop-in replacement for ant, and gradually adopt more advanced features.
• According to the documentation, Maven is transcendental happiness that makes all your wildest dreams come true. You just have to meditate on the manual for 10 years before you become enlightened.
• Maven makes your build process dependent on your network connection.
• Maven has useless error messages. Compare ant's "Target x does not exist in the project y" to mvn's "Invalid task 'run': you must specify a valid lifecycle phase, or a goal in the format plugin:goal or pluginGroupId:pluginArtifactId:pluginVersion:goal" Helpfully, it suggests I run mvn with -e for more information, which means that it will print the same message, then a stack trace for a BuildFailureException.

A large part of my dislike for maven can be explained by the following excerpt from Better Builds with Maven:

When someone wants to know what Maven is, they will usually ask “What exactly is Maven?”, and they expect a short, sound-bite answer. “Well it is a build tool or a scripting framework” Maven is more than three boring, uninspiring words. It is a combination of ideas, standards, and software, and it is impossible to distill the definition of Maven to simply digested sound-bites. Revolutionary ideas are often difficult to convey with words.

My suggestion: if you can't convey the ideas with words, you should not attempt to write a book on the subject, because I'm not going to telepathically absorb the ideas.

Answer 3

I've certainly bitched & moaned about maven in the past. But now, I wouldn't be without it. I feel that the benefits far outweigh any problems. Chiefly:

• Standardized project structure.
  • Given a new developer joining a project:
    • When you say it's a Maven project, then developer knows the project layout and how to build and package the project
    • When you say it's an Ant project, then developer will have to wait for you to explain more or will have to go through the build.xml to figure things out.
  • Of course, it's always possible to impose on company-wide standard with Ant but I think more often than not, you will be re-inventing the proverbial wheel.
• Dependency management.
  • Not just with external libraries but also with internal libraries/modules. Be sure to use a Maven repository proxy server such as Nexus or Artifactory.
  • It's possible to do some of this with Ivy. In fact, if all you need is a dependency management, you're probably better off using Ivy.
• Particularly within a project. I've found it quite useful to break out little subprojects, and maven handles this well. It's much more difficult with ant.
• Standardized artifact management (especially in conjunction with nexus or artifactory)
• The release-plugin is wonderful.
• The Eclipse & NetBeans integration is quite good.
• Integration with hudson is superb. Particularly the trend graphs for things like findbugs.
• It's a minor point, but the fact that maven embeds details like the version number inside the jar or war (not just in the filename) by default is tremendously helpful.

The downsides for me are chiefly:

• The command line is quite unhelpful. This put me off a lot to begin with.
• The XML format is very verbose. I can see why it was done that way, but it's still a pain to read.
  • That said, it's got an XSD for easy editing in an IDE.
• It's difficult to get your head round it in the beginning. Things like the lifecycle, for example.
  • The definitive guide to maven is a good introduction however.

I truly believe that it's worth spending a little bit of time getting to know maven.

Answer 4

The short answer: I've found it very difficult to maintain a Maven build system, and I would like to switch to Gradle as soon as I can.

I've been working with Maven for over four years. I would call myself an expert on build systems because in the last (at least) five companies I've been in, I've done major renovations on the build/deploy infrastructure.

Some of the lessons I've learned:

• Most developers tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about build systems; as a result, the build turns into a spaghetti mess of hacks, but they do appreciate it when that mess is cleaned up and rationalized.
• In dealing with complexity, I would rather have a transparent system that exposes the complexity (like Ant) than one that tries to make complex things simple by imposing rigid restrictions, like Maven. Think of Linux vs. Windows.
• Maven has a lot of holes in functionality which require byzantine workarounds. This leads to POM files that are incomprehensible and unmaintainable.
• Ant is super-flexible and understandable, but Ant files can get pretty big too, because it's so low-level.
• For any significant project, developers have to create their own build/deploy structure beyond what the tool provides; the suitability of the structure to the project has a lot to do with how easy it is to maintain. The best tools will support you in creating a structure and not fight you.

I've looked into Gradle a bit and it looks like it has the potential to be the best of both worlds, allowing a mix of declarative and procedural build description.

Answer 5

There are lot of reasons why people don't like Maven, but let face it they are very subjective. Maven today with some good (and free) books, better documentation, biger set of plugins and lot of referential succesful project builds isn't the same Maven as it was one or two years ago.

Using Maven in simple projects is very easy, with bigger/complicated ones there is need for more knowledge and deeper understanding of Maven philosophy - maybe in company level a position for Maven guru like network admin. Main source of Maven hates statments are often ignorance.

Another niggle for Maven is lack of flexibility like e.g. in Ant. But remeber Maven has set of conventions - sticking to them seems to be hard in the begining, but in the end often save as from problems.

Current success of Maven proves its value. Of course nobody is perfect and Maven has some cons and its quirks but in my opinion Maven slowly sways his opponents.

Answer 6

I wouldn't say it has a bad rep so much as it has a mixed rep. If your project follows the "convention over configuration" paradigm advocated by Maven then you can get a lot leverage out of it. If your project doesn't fit well into Maven's world view then it can become a burden.

To that end, if you have control over the project, then Maven may be the way to go. But if you don't and the layout is determined by someone not a fan of Maven, it may be more trouble than it's worth. The happiest Maven projects are probably the ones that started as Maven projects.