• More readable PDF content. – Typography makes a huge difference to the readability and usability of a text like Maven: The Definitive Guide, and this edition marks a series of editions that are going to focus on bringing the PDF format of this book up to the level of the printed, post-production version of the book. In this release:
  • Font was reduced to 11 point from 14 point. In addition to saving a few trees, this makes the book easier to read.
  • Page margins reduced to 0.3 inches. Again, if you look at an old version of the PDF, you’ll see that the margins were all over the place and the page wasn’t even centered.
  • More sophisticated table layout. As this books develops, I expect it to grow more “useful” tables than we have now. The FlexMojos chapter is full of long reference tables for each plugin goal, and we’re stating to get more sophisticated about table layout in the PDF.
• First Version of FlexMojos Chapter Completed – Chapter 20 covers the FlexMojos plugin and how you can use Apache Maven to compile, document, test, and build Flex applications. FlexMojos just recently had a 3.2.0 release which added more support for unit testing, and the next FlexMojos release 3.3.0 is going to emphasize unit test coverage reports. The first draft of the Flex chapter covers everything you need to know about configuring your development environment for Flex to using the FlexMojos archetype to start a new Flex project in Maven.

Changes in Edition 0.5

The following changes affect the entire book:

The bulk of the changes in the 0.5 release where in the FlexMojos chapter, a chapter which is still in a draft status as the FlexMojos project continues to develop.

Just wanted to give people a heads up. The FlexMojos chapter is going to be the focus of the 0.5 release of the Maven book. I got a quick request yesterday for the most recent documentation for FlexMojos 3.1.0, and it motivated me to spend some time on our Flex chapter. If you are a reader, and you are looking for more documentation, you should know that you have two options to help drive our priorities for the Maven book. You can:

• Give us Feedback using GetSatisfaction, OR
• Create a JIRA Task in the MVNDEF project

GetSatisfaction is a bit more community oriented and personal, while JIRA is more direct. If you are already participating in Sonatype’s open source development effort, you likely already have a JIRA account with us. Whatever you do, don’t hesistate to let us know what documentation you need. We’re listening.

Reading Our Work in Progress

The most recent build from the master branch of the book’s GitHub project is always available here. This version of the book is updated automatically whenever changes are pushed to master. The build process is currently running on a Hudson instance that is not visible to the public, but I have a JIRA task created to move this to the public grid.sonatype.org/ci instance of Hudson. The book build currently takes about 30 minutes (eek!) this is mainly due to the fact that we build all of the languages at once and there are some lingering issues with the lifecycle that cause certain tasks to run twice. Note: The PDF of the staged version of the book is not available, if you download the PDF, you’ll be downloading the released version. (If you really need the PDF of the staged version, you are welcome to build it yourself.

The 0.5 release of the book is in progress. I’d say we have about two or three days between now and the formal release. You can take a look at the remaining issues in our JIRA instance here. What remains for the 0.5 release is some documentation about Flex Unit Testing , Flex Code Coverage Tools, and a few other FlexMojos goodies. Since the 0.4 release earlier this week, we’ve updated the FlexMojos documentation to reflect the latest Flex archetypes and add some essential documentation about configuring your environment for unit testing: here is the latest staged version of Chapter 20

Did I mention that you should really sign up for our Chicago training yet? Because, if I didn’t, I should have.