Yesterday we published a Ivy-specific evaluation guide for Nexus Professional, and today we’re diving into the details of how to get Ivy to work with both Nexus OSS and Nexus Pro. Here are some simple Knowledge Base entries from our Support portal that do just that:

• How do I configure my Ivy build to download artifacts from Nexus? in Nexus OSS
• How do I configure my Ivy build to publish artifacts to Nexus? in Nexus OSS

As we expand our coverage of build tools and technologies, we’d encourage you tell us which build tools you use for development. Next on our list is covering Nexus integration with Ant + the Aether Ant tasks.

Java developers adapting an existing Ant build to dependency management often turn to Ivy. Here’s an evaluation guide for Nexus Professional using two, very simple Ant+Ivy projects. If you are evaluating Nexus Professional, or if you are just looking for some sample projects that configure an Ant + Ivy build to use a repository take a look at this guide. These two projects have build.xml, ivy.xml, and ivysettings.xml files that demonstrate the simplest case of configuring an Ivy build to:

• Download dependencies from a Nexus Repository Group with Ivy
• Deploy an Artifact to a Nexus Snapshot Repository from Ivy
• Staging an Artifact to a Nexus Staging Repository from Ivy

Download Nexus Professional, and then get the eval guide.

Update 2013-05: The evaluation guide has been updated and is now available in HTML and PDF format.

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.