Over the past ten years, demands for faster and better software have reshaped the way we do our jobs. Software used to be written. Today it’s assembled from components, and built and delivered continuously.

Join Jason van Zyl, for 30 minutes on Thursday, June 28 at 2:00PM EDT (GMT-0400) when he will be discussing the trends that will shape the next phase of software development. Jason will share insights on the future of Apache Maven-based development, and the emerging trend towards component lifecycle management.

Reserve Your Seat

If you register, you’ll also receive access to the recording after the event. So if something comes up and you can’t make it, you won’t miss out.

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

Manfred Moser – Kicking Apps and Taking Names

We have had the pleasure of working directly with Manfred Moser for the better part of a year and have been familiar with his work for much longer. Given Manfred’s constant and continuous work with the community we are sure many of you know him but for those that don’t, here is a little bit of background on Manfred.

Manfred has been professionally developing software in Java since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed open source fanatic, as well as an Android application developer, consultant, author and speaker. He has a long history of developing software in Internet, enterprise and mobile spaces. He is now working as an Android application developer and consultant with his own company, simpligility technologies.

simpligility technologies brings simplicity and agility to software development, processes, products and customers. With Manfred’s engineering background, teaching experience and passion for tools and infrastructure, he loves helping and mentoring other developers and development teams. He is able to understand complex requirements, business processes and software systems and cut through all the distractions to the core purpose and aim of an application. With this background simpligility offers a myriad of helpful consulting services.

We have been very lucky to work with Manfred on a number of projects. He is a core committer to the Android Maven Plugin and has co-authored our Sonatype book Maven: The Complete Reference, where he recently revamped the Maven Android chapter.  He is a Hudson committer and co-authored the new Hudson Book with Tim O’Brien.  Manfred is also a core contributor to our brand new Nexus Best Practices training course materials.

Manfred is the founder of the Vancouver Island Java User Group in Victoria, BC and in addition to presenting at java user group meetings, he has also presented at a number of conferences around the world. His next appearance will be at AnDevCon II in San Francisco this week from November 6 to 9, 2011.  If you plan to be there, we highly recommend popping into at least one of his sessions. The two sessions Manfred will be leading are: Taking Advantage of Apache Maven for Your Android Builds and Testing Android Apps – Going from Zero to Hero.

You can follow Manfred on twitter @simpligility or read the simpligility blog here.

We would like to thank Manfred for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Manfred!

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

It Takes a Village…and Anders Hammar

We have been very lucky to work directly with Anders for a number of years now and we can confidently say he is one of the most seasoned Apache Maven experts and evangelists that we know.  We are sure many of you know him, but for those that don’t–here is a little bit of background on Anders.

Anders is a software architect and CTO of Devoteam Sweden, a Certified Sonatype Partner in Stockholm, Sweden. He’s been working professionally with Java for more than ten years.  For the last four years he has focused on Maven,  providing support, consulting and training. Anders works with development organizations to help them adopt and customize their use of Maven and Sonatype Nexus to set up a strong development infrastructure that allows them to build better software, faster.

Being a true believer of open source, Anders is active in several open source projects including Codehaus Mojo, Codehaus Cargo and the Apache Maven Project. Anders takes pride in giving back to the projects he uses in his professional work. It is not uncommon to find him giving a talk or tutorial on Maven or Nexus at conferences like Jfokus or Oredev. Lucky for us, he’s also one of the primary authors of the Sonatype Book Repository Management with Nexus and a contributing author to the rest of our Sonatype Books.

A personal note from Tim O’Brien on Anders: “Anders has been quietly and continuously contributing to all of our Sonatype books over the past few years, and he’s a big reason why you don’t have to suffer through all of my typos and misspellings.“

If you are located in Europe and are looking for Maven or Nexus consulting or training don’t hesitate to contact Devoteam Sweden. Under the leadership of Anders they can offer you the in-depth technical knowledge to help you get started with implementing a Maven or Nexus environment or improving an existing one with customizations.

We would like to thank Anders for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Anders!

“With the Maven 3 betas being out and packing a tonne of cool features we decided that we needed to sit down and talk with someone in the know. Enter Brian Fox, PMC Chair Apache Maven and VP of Engineering at Sonatype (the fellows who make Maven Repositories manageable via their Nexus product).”

This interview touches upon Brian’s background in build management and developer infrastructure, and how Brian started to use Maven and became involved in the Apache Maven project. You will also hear Brian discuss the history of Maven, the motivations behind the project, some comparisons between Maven and Ant, and new features planned for the Maven 3 release.

To listen to the full interview, click here.

Here is a small excerpt from the interview, and to read the full interview click here.

Scott: The first time I bumped into design patterns, which seem to be at the core of what you were talking about, I was at a software conference down in San Francisco, and one of the gang of four was giving a presentation on design patterns.

He was talking about how they were sitting around lamenting the notion that Smalltalk developers seem to solve the same problem the same way, because there were design patterns baked into the language, whereas C++ developers might solve the same problems in a whole bunch of different (and often horrific) ways, because they could go off in any direction they want.

As a result, there was a big push about factoring problems in terms of the patterns that you were looking at. It sounds like that’s really entrenched in Maven: that when you’re building software, there are certain patterns that repeatedly arise, and if they’re codified in the build system, then the same things are done the same way, even across a wide group of people who never talk to each other.

Jason: Maven is opinionated, and I designed to be this way. I don’t think it’s possible to have a tool work for such a large number of people unless you restrict some of the options and provide some guidelines.

Some people at first railed against Maven conventions and the fact that you have to do things a certain way, but if you follow those patterns, you generally can get a software project up and running in a day.

That’s evidenced by the traffic from Maven central, which has become the de facto standard central repository for Maven artifacts in the open source community. We get on the order of 250 or 300 million hits a month against it. In 2008, we had about 1.9 million unique visitors to Maven central. In 2009, we had almost four million.

So, even though Maven’s opinionated, it seems to work for a lot of people. Even though you’re restricted in some of the things you do, it provides more value by limiting what you can do than it would in providing ultimate freedom to give you as much rope as you want.

Cities that are designed well usually have structural patterns in common. Look at cities that don’t have much infrastructure or don’t copy other cities. Lots of cities in North America do that, and they have horrible infrastructures. A lot of developers and organizations tend not to look at what’s happened in the past, and they often repeat mistakes over and over again.

You can read more here:

 http://maven.apache.org/

Downloads of source and binary distributions are listed in our download section:

 http://maven.apache.org/download.html

A major goal of Maven 3.0 is to be compatible, to the extent possible, with existing plugins and projects designed for Maven 2.x. Users interested in testing this beta release should have a glance at the compatibility notes for known differences between Maven 3.0 and Maven 2.x:

 http://cwiki.apache.org/MAVEN/maven-3x-compatibility-notes.html

If you encounter unexpected problems while using Maven 3.0-beta-1, please feel free to contact us via the Maven developer list:

 http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html

Click here to read more about the event, and to view presentations from the Maven Meetup on Next Generation Infrastructure: Maven Enterprise Stack, Hudson in the Enterprise, Managing Runtimes with Proviso, and Repository Interoperability and P2 Management with Nexus.

Thank you to all who attended the event!

Javascript deserves the same build support as other source code.  It needs to be tested as a part of the build and integrated into the overall build lifecycle.  Stéphane Épardaud writes a great how-to about using Rhino, the Maven Jetty plugin, and a Maven plugin called Testlol to run AJAX-enabled JavaScript unit tests in Maven.  Check out his blog post, it is a testament to the flexibility of Maven that it can be adapted to support such a wide range of languages and technologies: from Flex to Java to Javascript, all within the same unified project structure and lifecycle.

Here’s an excerpt from Épardaud’s original post:

While adding a new feature to RESTEasy — the generation of JavaScript  skeleton code to invoke RESTful web services implemented in JAX-RS  — I candidly proceeded to write unit tests for that part.  Unit testing this new feature meant making sure that not only was the JavaScript code produced by the web services (in our case, produced by a Servlet, and thus running in a Servlet container), I also wanted to make sure that the JavaScript code was valid, contained all the functions required and that the functions worked. Since the generated functions use AJAX to call the web services, that leaves us with the following constraints on what we need in order to test this:

• A test framework integrated into the project’s build tool, Maven
• JAX-RS web services whose JavaScript skeleton code to produce, and to invoke
• A Servlet container to run those JAX-RS web services, as well as my JavaScript generator Servlet
• A JavaScript interpreter that I can use in Java (since this is the RESTEasy implementation language)
• A JavaScript interpreter that also can do AJAX
• A JavaScript interpreter that supports JavaScript 1.8 (since I use a feature introduced in that version: native JSON)

Read Épardaud’s complete post, it takes you through the process of installing the appropriate JARs and configuring your POM to test Javascript with Maven.