Tag Archives: Community

Maven over Ant + Ivy: A Team Perspective by Les Hazlewood


January 15, 2010 By Jason van Zyl

Les Hazlewood has an objective summary of why he eventually came around to deciding that Maven is a better overall solution then Ant + Ivy. This is an evolution in thought process that we, Sonatype, often see in enterprises and Les has two blog entries that illustrate this evolution perfectly.

Maven 2 vs Ant+Ivy: Our selection process: This entry gives Les’ original perspective on Maven and the process by which he originally decided to choose Ant + Ivy.

Maven 2 vs Ant+Ivy: Revisited: This entry gives Les’ new perspective and why his enterprise team, and the Apache Shiro project, have chosen Maven.

I now firmly believe that Maven 2 is a better build and project management tool than Ant+Ivy. I was wrong.

Yep, I said it. I’m man enough to admit when I’ve made mistakes and that I’ve learned from my experiences. And this is coming from the guy that wrote a (still popular) OnJava article for Ant in the enterprise.

Overall, life with Maven is good. I’m glad that I was able to swallow my pride, really give it a chance, and in turn reap the benefits. I haven’t used Ant in over a year since switching, nor have I ever felt the need to go back.

We hope this perspective helps potential enterprises save time when looking for a build and release infrastructure.

Selecting OSS Software: 10 Questions Answered for Sonatype Nexus


January 13, 2010 By Jason van Zyl

Last month there was an article on TechRepublic entitled “10 questions to ask when selecting open source products for your enterprise”.   As both a consumer and producer of open source enteprise software, I thought that this list of questions captures the areas that people should be thinking about when they are selecting a technology.   Open source technology selection is about much more than just feature comparison.   When you are selecting an open source technology, you have to think about licensing issues, the scope of the supporting community, and open source governance models.   Since we’ve been talking a lot about Nexus, I wanted to summarize our efforts by answering these questions for potential users.  If you’re trying to decide what repository manager to use in your organization I hope that the answers to these questions help you make an informed decision. Continue reading →

Nexus: Improving Maven Central and Supporting the Maven Ecosystem


By Jason van Zyl

Nexus is more than just a repository manager.  It is a project that has been developed using the same underlying infrastructure of Maven, and it has forced us to think about the different ways in which the components that comprise Maven can be integrated with other, more complex systems.   It is a critical step toward a more mature Maven ecosystem which starts to encompass much more than just software builds.   You can think of Nexus as the second major project to emerge from the Maven ecosystem – an ecosystem which includes both commercial interests as well as open source volunteers and community participants.

Sonatype is focused on improving the foundational infrastructure which will allow us to improve the quality of artifacts and their accompanying metadata in Maven Central and Maven repositories around the world.  A lot of this is not especially glamorous work and though many people complain about the state of some of the Maven repositories, very few take action.    Here are some of the things Sonatype is doing with Nexus to improve the state of the Maven ecosystem and expand its scope.

Continue reading →

Maven in the Wild: Smart's Mythbusters and a Review of the Maven Book


January 12, 2010 By Tim O'Brien

John Smart has been dealing out smackdown with his Maven Mythbusters series over on his Wakaleo Consulting blog.   His first two entries in this series debunk some persistent myths about Maven:

These are important articles for you to read if you have been responsible for introducing Maven into a new environment.   Invariably, every time you introduce Maven somewhere new, you’ll meet up with people echoing some of these myths.   The idea that Maven takes seven minutes to run the Clean plugin, or that Maven requires internet access is nothing more than FUD, and John Smart is doing a good job dismantling these myths.   Read these posts on John Smart’s blog.

A Review of Maven By Example

In other news, John Yeary has been diving into Maven by Example.  John writes of the book:

This turned out to be a really good book on learning Maven. It is a Creative Commons licensed book so that it offers the community a chance to update the book and add content. Like any great open source project, giving the community to have a direct chance to update the project produces a better final product.

Continue reading →

Sonatype and the Foundation of the Maven Community


By Jason van Zyl

While the Sonatype Nexus team has been focused on making Nexus an excellent repository manager, we have also been working in many different areas and on many different projects to improve the Maven ecosystem. In this post, I’m going to try to describe the ways in which we’ve tried to help set a solid foundation for continued development. For the past decade, we have tried as much as possible to create social capital and increase technical cohesion among the various projects and interests that define the Maven community. Before I can get into the specific ways that Sonatype contributes to the open source ecosystem surrounding Maven and Nexus, I will need to define those two terms: social capital and technical cohesion, and I will need to discuss Maven’s origins.

While Maven was created to meet the needs of a specific project, then a part of the Jakarta project at the ASF, it was also a concept that I had been thinking about for a few years.  I rarely enjoy foisting my own philosophical views on others, and I’m not going to start doing that in this post.   What I will do is talk about some of the ideas about architecture, technology, and progress that helped shape my own view of what problems Maven was designed to solve and how the organization and approach of the Maven community has been shaped by these ideas. Continue reading →