Things I miss when you don’t use Maven or publish to the repo
January 18th, 2009
- Being able to depend on a project without having to download, unzip, locate jars, locate dependencies, and add them all to my classpath
- Automatically getting the sources attached to my IDE once I depend on it (meaning I don’t have to check it out from SVN…)
- Automatically getting the javadocs attached to my IDE once I depend on it (meaning I don’t have to check it out from SVN…)
- Knowing exactly how to setup a project in the IDE once I download it’s sources
- Standard commands to build and test and deploy
- Modularization. This isn’t Maven specific per se, but on the whole, people who use ant don’t modularize their build and end up with one ugly amalgamation of source code.
I’ll also add that it seems very duplicitous to pull down dependencies from the Maven repository via Ivy and not publish dependencies/POMs to the Maven repository.
This entry was insipired by some tinkering with Hadoop (and subprojects) for those who were wondering…
January 18th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Yes, my reaction to Hadoop having looked into building it from source before was…. (rolling eyes) oh, right you jackasses are just too clever to use Maven because you “know better”.
January 18th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Yes, I agree. On bigger things the “locate dependencies” does suck … and it IS convenient to have attached src/javadoc.
Generally I do like maven, but every now and than… some (random) dependency issues are there´…
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:38 pm
The fact that Hadoop uses Ant is not surprising since it’s part of the larger Ant build system at Yahoo. That’s why they are stuck with it. It was a business decision not a technical one.