“Central”, “Maven Central”, “The Central Repository”. You’ll here these terms a lot when discussing Java open source-based development. At Sonatype, we often take it for granted that everyone knows what we mean when we say “Central”. We know that’s not true, so we’ve put together this short video overview of Central and what it means to the Java community. Enjoy. Continue reading
Sonatype makes it easy to add your projects to the Central Repository with a free, public hosting service called OSSRH. We first blogged about this back in 2009, but given the growth in the community, we thought some of you may not have seen that post, so we decided to update it. Continue reading
We create a search index for the Maven repository so that you don’t have to. What does this mean for you? It means that you don’t have to run a “little Google” in your datacenter just to search for the latest log4j library, and you also don’t have to sacrifice Terabytes of bandwidth to download thousands of artifacts you’ll never use to just to find the handful you need for your project. This is all done for you on Central, and the tools you use to search Central, Nexus and m2eclipse all benefit from this pre-made index file.
While this seems like such a simple idea, the Maven ecosystem hasn’t had a standard way to search the repository for the majority of its history. For much of the last decade there was no reliable way to search for an artifact. In this post, I’m going to review this history and talk about Maven repository search and where we think search is headed. With the release of Nexus OSS 1.9 it is now a good time to summarize the results of Sonatype donation of the Nexus Indexer to the Apache Software Foundation.
Maven Central has become an increasingly important resource for the development community at large. We’ve put several efforts forward earlier this year to help improve the content quality and to reduce the time required to get artifacts into the repository. These have matured over time and are now automatically validating artifacts. These processes are documented for Maven Projects and 3rd Party Artifacts.
To improve the experience for users in Europe, Sonatype has provisioned a new official repository in the United Kingdom. This is more than a mere mirror of Central, this system is updated in lockstep with the systems here in the US, and is managed and monitored 24×7 by Contegix, the same team watching over the US repositories. The new repository consists of two fully redundant systems running in parallel to provide complete fail-over capacity.
In addition to the new repository, we have taken several steps to improve and further secure Central itself:
Sonatype is happy to announce that Google Web Toolkit 2.0.4 jars are now available in the Maven Central repository. The Google Web Toolkit blog explains this move in more detail:
Better maven support has been frequently requested on the issue tracker and mailing list, and this is a first step in that direction. In the future, Google will publish GWT releases to maven central as part of the release process.
The GWT 2.0.4 jars currently in the repository include gwt-user, gwt-dev, and gwt-servlet. To publish these artifacts in the Maven Central repository, Google publishes artifacts to Nexus OSS, the Open Source oss.sonatype.org repository. You can see the Google-specific repository on this server here. Releases are staged to this Google repository on oss.sonatype.org and then subsequently released and synchronized to the Maven Central repository.
