Alpha 0.3: Alternative Plugin Languages and Fixes

We've cut another release of Maven: The Definitive Guide. This version adds a new chapter on alternative plugin languages and makes some improvements to the Spring Web chapter (ch07).

The alternative plugin language chapter is light, I wanted to provide a starting point for people who were interested in starting to write plugins in Ruby, Groovy, and Ant. The Groovy and Ant sections need more development, but the Ruby section should be sufficient for someone looking to start writing custom Maven plugins. Over time, you should expect this chapter to fill out a bit, we still need to add sections about calling Ant tasks from a Groovy Mojo and I'm thinking about adding a more complex Ant example. Note that we cut Beanshell from this version of the book so that we could devote more time to these three languages. Please let us know what you think of the content.

As always, we're working towards getting this book into production and we really value your feedback. Please send all feedback to book@sonatype.com. We've had some really great feedback to date and a number of readers have helped us catch some errors and clarify some issues. I'm making it a practice of added people's names to the acknowledgements as we go along. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to send us feedback.

1. Simple (ch03): Added a quick note to the simple chapter which clarifies where to run mvn install
2. Preface: Updated the preface to include acknowledgements
3. Spring Web: Updated the spring web chapter to incorporate bug fixes and errors. This chapter now provides instructions for running the web application.
4. Spring Web: Added the hibernate-commons-annotations JAR, even though we are not using the commons-annotations, we need this dependency for Hibernate to work properly.
5. Spring Web: Added Velocity to the simple-webapp pom
6. Spring Web: Removed the duplicate 1.5 source config in ch07 examples
7. Spring Web: Upgraded to the Hibernate Mojo 2.1 (Reyes released this last week)
8. Alt Plugins: Adding a Draft of the Alternative Plugin Language Chapter
9. Alt Plugins: Added the Ant Plugin Example
10. Alt Plugins: Added the Ruby Plugin Example
11. Alt Plugins: Added the Groovy Plugin Example