[Jwebunit-development] Off topic: using Maven

[Martijn D. <ma...@da...>]

Nick Neuberger wrote:

>I'm very familiar with ANT but not Maven.  Are there goods and bads to using
>Maven?
>  
>
Read this article:
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=MavenMagic
It is a very good read.

The dependency resolving is very comfortable. All dependencies are 
resolved automatically. Site generation is also magnificent. Junit 
reports (normally rather painful to generate in the right directory for 
your ant project site) are just 1 line away. Adding clover support or 
jcoverage is also 1 line.

For business projects, it is nice to see which developers are part of 
the development team. With statcvs one can see the major contributors 
(nice for evaluations ;-). Using the changes.xml file, the changes 
plugin and the announcement plugin, it is very easy to generate an 
announcements.txt (posted on the theserverside.com) and it is integrated 
with the site.

The bads are: it is slower, sometimes too slow. It depends on the type 
of site you generate. If you enable all reports, you can get a decent 
cup of coffee. But if you're only interested in the test reports, then 
it is not much slower than using ant.
It is also not very stable. Since it depends on many plugins, some of 
which aren't of production quality. However most plugins just re-use ant 
tasks and just work.

>It seems like its very much the same.  We may try and start using maven here
>at work as well.  Although, we have about 20 projects to build and we are
>using cruisecontrol to build our code..
>  
>
Integration of maven with cruisecontrol is not more difficult than 
integrating ant. Or so I'm told. I should just start with the most 
simple project you have and mavenize it. Integrate it with cc. 
*EVALUATE* and come to the conclusion that it works ;-) Then go to 
project number 2.

With regards,

Martijn