What are your impressions of Maven? [closed]

Answer 1

we're using maven for a really big project (more than 15 modules) and we tried hard not to fight the tool but

1) maven solves the 90% of common problems, but if you're struggling the other 10% it is always a mess to fiddle with

2) life-cycle management is a mess. Even if you choose a correct phase for your stuff to happen, sometimes it doesn't work. And you don't know the f***ing why

3) we fight hard but eventually we gave up: we use ant from maven. Sometimes we use even ant to call maven. Now don't even try to think we sucks: if only you could see the complexities of certain steps in our build process... it is just that maven gets in your ways more often than not for building complex projects.

4) the local repository management is a burden. Artifactory is not good. And other similar products.

All in all: I would suggest Ant (maybe with Ivy if you want dependencies management, but I never tried that)

Bye Stefano

Answer 2

For an open-source project, Maven has some advantages, especially for your contributors (eg mvn eclipse:eclipse).

If you do go with Maven, the one rule you must follow religiously is: don't fight the tool. Layout your project exactly how Maven recommends, follow all its conventions and best practices. Every little fight you get into with Maven is a day you won't be spending writing code for your project.

Also consider up front where you want to deploy your artifacts (are you going to host your own repository?).

And don't be afraid to go with something other than Maven (eg Ant). The success of your project will be the project itself, not its build tool (so long as you choose a best-of-breed build tool, which both Ant and Maven are).

Answer 3

Maven can be used to manage the entire lifecycle of your project, from the start to the deployment. If those are what you need, then Maven is the right tool. If you're just looking for a tool for dependency management, you may want to look into Ant's Ivy too.

It has been used in most of the projects that I worked on and.. although sometimes irritating (the configurations and documentation), it has saved me a lot of time. Most of the Apache's Java-based projects use Maven.

Whether Maven works, it really depends on what you want it to do for you.

yc

Answer 4

The documentation is getting better, and m2eclipse is simply awesome. But someone above pointed out the "broken by design" article. He made some good points. While I personally think maven is a better tool than ant, in the long run our experience will make maven3 a better tool than maven2.

I couldn't live without it. I can go to ANY machine in the world with an internet connection, a JDK and Maven 2, check out my git repository, and run 'mvn test', and it'll build. Say that about any other build tool, I dare you. :-)

Answer 5

We have a community of Open Source developers working independently on their own projects. Several of these projects use libraries from other projects. Without dependency management we run into cyclic dependencies in jars. ant did not help with these problems (this was before Ivy, which I haven't used). By using maven, and deploying jars, we are managing to reduce the dependencies and get many fewer problems. So we have benefited enormously from having a dependency management tool and personally I have found that the effort to use maven is very much worth it.

Answer 6

I love Maven and I use it all the time. Part of the reason is that it is very simple to set up via Eclipse's XML plugins (it has an XSD that is very descriptive). Maven is great for dependency management as well, as it lets you download jars from repositories and exclude transitive dependencies where applicable. It also has a built in site:site goal which is great for producing project websites with applicable reports.

Maven is great for projects that are just starting, but it does have its expected format of your source code. If you start your project with Maven, knowing what it can do immediately, it will help you greatly. But you should definitiely research it. "Out of the box", maven can do great things, and plugins for it abound. However, some things ANT handles better than Maven, and if there's not a Maven plugin for it, it may be difficult to handle in Maven. But, you can always learn to create your own Maven plugin as well.

See Better Builds With Maven for a good guide to maven.

Oh, and these comments apply to Maven 2, I've never used Maven 1.