• User Tokens – Developers who need to authenticate against a Nexus server can now make use of user tokens. This is a pair of authentication keys which can be used in your settings in lieu of storing a plaintext password. Storing a plaintext password in a build has always been a bad idea, and this new version of Nexus lets you access Nexus securely.
• Advanced Staging Capabilities – Our Engineering team upgraded one of the most popular features of Nexus, the Staging capability. With this newly improved staging subsystem your staged releases now benefit from a range of advanced features, such as atomic deployments and closer integration with Nexus REST services. This feature is an implement in Nexus Professional as a Maven Staging plugin.

Evaluating Nexus Professional just got a whole lot easier

If you are evaluating Nexus Pro, you’ll benefit from an easy to use installer, which was designed to automate the installation, configuration and set of Nexus on Windows, OSX and Linux. With this new installer, users are able to customize where Nexus will be installed and what port Nexus will be configured to listen on. This installer will even automate the setup and configuration of a set of simple evaluation projects. It has never been easier to get started with your Nexus Professional evaluation. Download a Nexus Professional trial and get started.

Nexus OSS 2.1 – Security and Bug Fixes You Need

Nexus OSS 2.1 has approximately 102 bug fixes – everything from an upgrade to Jetty 8 to security fixes. Nexus OSS 2.1 is faster, more secure, and more stable thanks in large part to our Insight product. Engineering ran the Insight report against our own software and identified some critical security bugs. If you are using a previous version of Nexus 2.0 (or if you are using an earlier version of Nexus 1.x) there is no good reason not to upgrade immediately.

Go download Nexus OSS 2.1 and start your upgrade.

Here are some of the highlights from Wayne’s presentation followed by the video of his talk and his slide deck:

• “The benefits of ‘many eyeballs’ in open source does create better software but you can only leverage that if you know about it. That’s particularly troubling in the context of the fact that more than 80% of the modern software application is [comprised of] open source and the components that are used to build those applications are surprisingly complex.”
• “That complexity is compounded by the fact that when issues arise their implications are viral and the big problem is that when those issues are resolved in the root components the solutions are not [similarly viral] . Spring Beans 2.5.6 compromised 1400 open source components and God knows how many downstream applications. When Spring Beans 2.5.6 was fixed, none of the others were fixed.”
• “You can imagine the ripple effect of compromising open source. And the combination of things like the lack of notification infrastructure and the complexity of open source componentry is how you get situations like this. 6,982 organizations including the Dept of Homeland Security and several financial institutions are still using a 3 year old crypto library with an “as bad as it gets” Level 10 flaw that has known exploit code.”
• “Sonatype is creating an extraordinary infrastructure for finding out everything knowable about a given component. So that when flaws are discovered, we can know and we have the ability to deliver that knowledge into the tools that developers are using every day. This family of technologies is called Insight.”
• “Critical to that is the Central repository. Central houses hundreds of thousands of components from nearly every open source project in the world and it is used by tens of thousands of organizations.”

Now that you’re primed with knowledge, jump in and see what a repository can do for your development workflow:

• Download a free evaluation copy of Nexus Professional
• Learn more about repository management
• Contact a Sonatype representative for more information

If you have any questions about Nexus or repositories in general, we have engineers (not just sales guys) who would be happy to speak with you.

This post outlines some of the new features available in all 1.9 releases of both Nexus Professional and Nexus Open Source. This release has a lot of important, under-the-hood changes – including a number of changes to the core infrastructure of Nexus to increase Maven 3 compatibility and to incorporate open source libraries for repository interaction (Aether and Maven Indexer). In addition to a wide array of fixes and features in Nexus Open Source, you can now use Nexus Professional to analyze Maven Dependencies.

• Download Nexus Professional 1.9.1
• Download Nexus Open Source 1.9.1

Changes in Nexus Professional 1.9.1

Nexus Professional has the following key benefits.  For a complete list of all features added and bugs fixed in Nexus Professional 1.9.1, see the official release notes (note: release notes require a log-in).

• Moved the Custom Metadata Plugin to optional plugins – This Custom Metadata plugin is now shipped as an optional dependency. If you are using the Custom Metadata plugin you will need to copy this plugin from the optional dependencies directory to the plugins directory. Nexus will then start up this plugin the next time it is restarted.
• The New Maven Module Dependency Report – Nexus Professional adds a helpful report for people browsing the repository. For the first time, you can click on an artifact and see a report of Maven dependencies. From this report you can click through to search for dependencies.

Changes in Nexus Open Source

Nexus Open Source 1.9.1 contains the following new features and updated capabilities. We’ve summarized some of the major features and bug fixes for your convenience. If you are looking for more details about a particular feature or fix, read the full release notes for a comprehensive list of features added and bugs fixed.

• New Nexus Archetype Plugin - Nexus 1.9.1 will now add any Maven Archetypes you deploy to your own repositories to the archetype catalog. Once an archetype is available in the archetype catalog, you can then access archetypes using tools like m2eclipse, which reference the archetype catalog when creating a new project.
• Uses the Maven Indexer - Sonatype has successfully completed the donation of the Nexus Indexer to the Apache Software Foundation, and we are integrating this newly donated “Maven Indexer” in this release of Nexus. For more information, read this post.
• Improvements to the Roles and Permissions Interface - The Nexus team spend a considerable amount of time trying to simplify the Roles and Permissions interface based on user feedback. We’ve tried to make it easier to understand at first glance, and we’re also tried to reduce the amount of work necessary to make changes to roles and permissions.
• Integrated Aether - Aether is a new open source library designed to capture best practices for retrieving information from Maven repositories. It provides a clean interface and manages fetching both metadata and artifacts. This version of Nexus incorporates Aether and replaces Mercury. Integrating Aether has also solved a number of minor issues involving Maven metadata and compatibility with Maven 3.
• Switched to Java 6 - Nexus has upgraded to Java 6.
• Nexus Upgraded Security from JSecurity to Apache Shiro - As an end-user you shouldn’t notice many changes in the interface to support this migration, but if you are developing custom security realms for Nexus, this post describes some of the changes you need to make to support the move to Shiro. Note: After this upgrade, both first name and last name are required fields for a user. If you have an existing user that only have one name (“Administrator”), you will need to supply a first and last name for this user if you ever edit this user through Nexus UI.
• Added robots.txt to bundle to stop public repos from getting crawled
• Improved Reindexing Performance - Reindexing performance has been considerably improved, achieving a nearly 2x speed up for certain repositories.
• Switched to the Affero General Public License - Nexus Open Source is now covered under the Affero General Public License. For more information about this switch see this post.
• Added a Start-up Script for 64-bit windows Platforms – If you are running Nexus on a 64-bit Window platform, you can now start Nexus with a 64-bit Windows JSW startup wrapper.

For information on upgrading Nexus, click here.

To view the replay, click here.

Our next webinar – Hudson Continuous Integration with Sonatype Professional – is taking place on March 29. If your development team is looking for best practices for integrating Maven, Hudson and Nexus Professional this webinar is for you.

Sonatype Professional is the only integrated suite created for Maven-centric builds. The suite includes Sonatype Certified & Integrated Distributions of: Maven, Hudson, Nexus Professional, Eclipse Integration, Developer Onboarding as well as support from the experts. Register to learn how Sonatype Professional empowers development teams to realize the promise of agile through continuous integration, while reducing project risk.

• Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2011
• Time: 9:00 am Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)
• Duration: 30 mins
• Presenter: Blaine Mincey, Sonatype Senior Systems Engineer
• Register for this webinar

Sonatype Professional is a suite of next generation development infrastructure software that extends the Maven ecosystem to improve both the speed and quality of Java development projects. Sonatype Professional integrates the m2eclipse, Nexus Professional, and Hudson-based continuous integration and adds unique developer onboarding functionality to get you productive fast.

Attend our webinar – Improving Developer Productivity with Sonatype Professional – to learn how this suite can help transform your software development process.

Webinar details:

• Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011
• Time: 1:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (New York, GMT-05:00)
• Presenter: Blaine Mincey, Sonatype Senior Systems Engineer
• Register today!

For the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter!

Learn best practices, central concepts, and complete integration for Maven, Nexus Professional, and m2eclipse. Sonatype books offer the latest content for the software development tools you depend on.

The third book in our series of books available for downloading is Repository Management with Nexus.

Nexus Professional is a next-generation repository manager that can proxy remote repositories, host internal repositories, encourage collaboration, and increase efficiency.

Repository Management with Nexus walks you through the installation process for both the Open Source version of Nexus and Nexus Professional, and it covers important topics such as:

• Installing Nexus as a Service on a Linux Machine
• Nexus Best Practices
• Managing Security with Nexus’ Fully Customizable Role-based Authentication System
• Reading Nexus System Logs
• Installing Nexus as a WAR in an Existing Application Server
• Configuring Nexus Professional’s LDAP Authentication Realm
• Configuring Nexus Professional’s Staging and Procurement Features

To download Repository Management with Nexus, please click here.

Sonatype Professional is tightly integrated with the Eclipse development environment to streamline builds, artifact search and reuse, defect detection, and bug fixes. From within Eclipse, users can:

• Visually manage Maven
• Browse and search Nexus repositories
• Submit Hudson continuous integration jobs
• Receive real-time build and continuous integration alerts
• Jump quickly to broken code

To learn more click here.

Learn best practices, central concepts, and complete integration for Maven, Nexus Professional, and m2eclipse. Sonatype books offer the latest content for the software development tools you depend on.

The first book in our series of books available for downloading is Maven by Example.

Learn by doing — Maven by Example walks you through the key concepts of the world’s leading project management tool.  This book covers key concepts of Apache Maven by building a sample multi-module Maven project which involves an object model, a database, a set of services, and a web application.

To learn more about Sonatype books, or to download Maven by Example, click here.