The answer to the “Why?” is often a mumbling about not enough time to upgrade and upon closer inspection,  I find that it was never honestly tried. It seems there is still a perception out there that Maven 3 is a new major version and is largely incompatible. However – that is completely false! It was true way back when Maven 1 was replaced by Maven 2, but is not true for the move to Maven 3. In fact, apart from a few minor edge cases, Maven 3 will work as a complete drop in replacement for Maven 2 with improved performance, better error reporting and many more enhancements.

One of the main goals for Maven 3 was to make it more suitable for embedding Maven in tools like an IDE or a CI server. This brings me to the second question “Are you sure?”. When asking about the IDE used for development on the project in question, the most frequent answer is Eclipse. I then find that a stock install of Eclipse with the m2Eclipse plugin, as provided in the last two Eclipse releases, is used. These integrations embed Maven 3 and therefore any work you do with your project in the IDE is actually using Maven 3. Assuming that it works, you are ready to move to Maven 3 on the command line. That is pretty much always the case since how would the developers otherwise do any work?

Now some people object that they have in fact configured Eclipse to use an external install of Maven 2. While that is correct and works for any execution of Maven from Eclipse that uses the “Run/Debug as Maven” features you are still using Maven 3 in many cases. In fact, compilation of your source on the fly, any POM editor work as well as “Run As – junit-tests” and “Run As – Java Application” is still being done by the embedded Maven 3. So whatever you do…you will most likely have Maven 3 in the mix. And realistically a mixed use case like that will be more complex and troublesome than an outright upgrade to Maven 3. Try it!

Writing extensions for sophisticated integrations and plugins like Tycho used for Eclipse and OSGi related development with Maven OS is in fact only possible with Maven 3 and therefore you may already be using Maven 3 for use cases like this.

With this knowledge and understanding you should now be ready to install Maven 3 and benefit from its increased performance and maybe fix some of the errors in your pom that it will find. While you’re at it, you should probably start creating a company POM and controlling your plugin versions used in your Maven builds. Then you could upgrade e.g. to the new Maven Compiler Plugin 2.5.1 and get another performance boost for your builds. To make sure that nobody sneaks in the creaky Maven 2, you could introduce a Maven Enforcer Plugin usage …

If you would like to learn more about Maven usage tips and tricks, you can join me in one of our upcoming virtual Maven training classes. — Or join me in our upcoming Nexus virtual training class to find out why and how you should really be using a repository manager with any build system that has built in dependency management (and they all do today).

See you then,

manfred

See what components are used, which versions, and when updates are available

We want to make component based development as easy as possible by providing you the tools to choose the right components from the beginning to speed development, improve quality, and reduce costly rework. This plugin, the first of a series of development tools, helps you tame the issues typically associated with utilizing open source Java components, including:

• Determining when new component versions are available and making informed update decisions
• Understanding what versions of each component are used in your project
• Identifying where specific components are used
• Updating components throughout your project

The plugin is build tool agnostic, and so works with all Java projects in general (Java, PDE, Maven, etc.).

This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding features to help you choose components that meet your security, quality, and licensing standards by providing useful information about each component right in the IDE.  For example, we’ll alert you when a component, or one of its dependencies has known security vulnerabilities. You’ll also be able to tell how each component or dependency is licensed without having to hunt through the code yourself.

So tame your dependencies today and get the Sonatype Insight Plugin for Eclipse.

Looking at the interested parties in the Hudson proposal it’s apparent that more resources than ever will be poured into the Hudson project. Oracle and Sonatype have been working diligently to add fundamental architectural improvements to Hudson — which has paved the way for a new stream of innovation. VMWare and Tasktop have also indicated that they will be providing additional development resources, and we’re keen to start collaborating with them.

Sonatype also hopes to attract more enterprise-class contributors by taking the lead and contributing our core Hudson innovations to Eclipse. This includes all of the Maven 3.x integration that we have created to date. We were originally only going to provide a portion of our Maven 3.x integration to the OSS community, but we are so excited about Hudson moving to Eclipse we want to stimulate community adoption and wider participation by providing the best Maven integration possible.

The Hudson proposal still needs to go through the 30-day review period within the Eclipse community, but we really think Hudson has found its new home.  The Eclipse Foundation is a highly respected organization, has proven to be a vendor neutral, and has fostered many successful projects.   Eclipse would be a great place for Hudson and Jenkins to reunite and now would be an ideal time.   It can only be a good thing for users and I sincerely hope that the Jenkins team will seriously consider this option.

Hudson plays a key role in Sonatype’s commercial product portfolio so we’re committed to making the project succeed at Eclipse. We will offer commercial support and value added functionality in our ‘Professional’ version of Hudson. We are planning to contribute all commercial work we’ve invested in thus far to the Hudson project but we have more commercial features in the pipeline. Our customers tell us that along with Apache Maven, Nexus, and m2eclipse, Hudson is a critical part of their software development infrastructure. Hudson will be successful at the Eclipse Foundation and Sonatype plans to take an active part in that success.

EclipseCon 2011 highlights

• “Meeting with Tycho developers from SAP for a face-to-face development session. It was completely ad-hoc, we just grabbed a table in the hotel lobby and worked on Tycho for few hours. Also, there was significant interest in Tycho, especially in an end-to-end solution that covers IDE, build, repository and deployment use cases.” – Igor (Software Developer)
• “The p2 talks were well attended, with the hottest one being our talk with Ian Bull from EclipseSource on the do’s and don’ts of p2. It was good to talk to people using p2 to provision farms of machine in the cloud. Finally there were also some good discussions on the future of p2 in Virgo.” – Pascal (Software Developer)
• “The Mobione app to make iPhone apps without programming was great for us marketing-types.” – Terry (Director, Product Marketing)
• Best food goes to: “The Burrito Station at the Exhibitor Reception!” – Emily (Community Manager)

Lastly, our session Next Generation Development Infrastructure: Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus & Hudson, led by Jason van Zyl was a highlight of the week for us. Thank you to all who attended, it was great to see such an interest in the next generation of development infrastructure and we look forward to working with the community to realize this vision.

We also wanted to say thank you to the Eclipse Foundation and everyone who helps make EclipseCon possible.

Stay tuned to the Sonatype blog next week as we’ll detail some of our presentations from EclipseCon.

This tutorial picks up where their morning tutorial Building Eclipse plugins and RCP applications with Tycho, Nexus & Hudson leaves off. If you’re planning on attending EclipseCon 2011, drop by and get hands on Tycho help from the Sonatype team!

For more on Sonatype at EclipseCon, click here.

For the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter!

Sonatype’s Jason van Zyl, Pascal Rapicault, and Igor Fedorenko, along with Jan Sievers from SAP AG, are holding a three-hour workshop on building Eclipse plugins and RCP applications with Tycho, Nexus and Hudson.

Build automation and continuous integration are central to the production of quality enterprise software. Without automation it is often difficult to keep track of defects and communicate build status. One of the goals of the Maven project is to bring efficient build automation to enterprise development, and as more organizations start to develop Eclipse plugins and RCP applications, there is a greater need for Maven to interoperate with the Eclipse platform. This tutorial will provide first hand experience in how to use Tycho, Nexus & Hudson to build Eclipse plugins and RCP applications.

To learn more about Sonatype at EclipseCon 2011, click here.

For the latest news and updates follow Sonatype on Twitter!

Recently I played around a little with Tycho because we evaluated it for the use in the RTP project. As a test case, I decided to try to build a RAP application with Tycho. With building I mean compiling and packaging the artifacts into a WAR file in order to deploy them on a Tomcat or another Servlet Container. I have to say that I’m really impressed with Tycho. Before this experience…

It’s great to see different projects trying Tycho at the Eclipse Foundation: having standard recipes for building RAP applications would be extremely useful addition for the community. RAP is not something that Sonatype is directly involved with so it’s great to get this varied perspective, and different applications types so we can make sure Tycho will work for as many use cases as possible. Thanks Holger!

Holger has some good examples at Github, and you can find his original blog entry here.

We are currently working on submitting the CQs for Tycho so we can move the project over to the Eclipse Foundation. I think Wayne Beaton said he wanted to help with those CQs. Right Wayne?