Let It Bee - Latest Comments

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

frederickbrock — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:46:57 -0000

I have accomplished controlling dependencies with Artifactory and enforcing -off-line builds locally via settings. Both approaches work. My project went through a stage where we did off line builds against a local repository that was checked into SVN. I had hudson set up to build off-line and ensured the correct dependencies where checked in.

After we got the dep tree stabilized I began removing the explicit versions and instead put them in a property in our master pom (multi module project). Once we had all the versions locked down I imported the repo into Artifactory on the build server which has access to the outside world. We haven't had a problem since.

There are many ways to control the dependencies in maven, but I agree they can be error prone and you need to control it as a matter of policy.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Stefan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:32:22 -0000

i don't know the complete picture of your projects, so there might not be many advantages in your case (maybe some minor advantages like resource filtering and reporting). but actually, that wasn't my point. i advised him to take a look at tycho and see if it provides a decent solution. but even if maven/tycho offers obvious advantages he'd still have a hard time convincing the die-hards. not die-hard ant pde builders :) but die-hard, 'fashionable' maven-haters.

nevertheless, i remember doing something which 'justifies' using maven :) The project has several artifacts: EAR, eclipse RCP based app and some common bundles (with osgi manifest). the idea was to setup ci with maven, and development with eclipse (pde). what are the advantages?
- only 1 dependency management system
- no extra steps needed to make the common bundles available in pde target platform (actually a consequence of the previous point
- still be able to use the eclipse pde support fro development
- reporting, resource filtering, automated build, easy integration of cobertura, style checking, ... like any other maven project

BUT i encountered several issues (duplication of metadata, repository setup, ...). but that was almost 2 years ago, so maybe the support is better now.

if raven provides more than gant then i'll certainly have a look at it. but it's not about being fashionable, that's the whole point. maybe a ruby/python variant for gradle would be fashionable ;)

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

gee — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:15:30 -0000

One of the oldstyle and die-hard eclipse RCP developer would like to know the advantages of using maven for RCP (with Equinox/OSGI inside)...
Dependency management?
-> 'we' have the 'better' one ;)
Project 'structure' conventions?
-> defined
Repository?
-> the Plugin-Target-Platform
Versions?
-> see http://wiki.eclipse.org/Ver...

Short: we don't need maven in the delevopment enviroment.
For the build the tycho 'manifest-first mode' sounds interessting (the goal would be an 'out of the box' build with CI) but I think: if this would work better than the standard PDE-Build the eclipse-guys would use it ... or will use it in the next release and we will follow ;)

Maybe tycho still works fine for standard-PDE-builds -> we have a high customized build and I'm not sure that tycho (and/or) CI can handle the implications...

And if you looking for something 'fashionable': Raven/Rake is comming! *g*

gee

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Stefan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:25:18 -0000

thanks for this objective comment.

the project layout conventions and the build lifecycle (convention) are indeed very interesting features of Maven

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Stefan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:15:58 -0000

hi,

very frustrating indeed :)

let them have a look at Tycho. It focuses on Eclipse and OSGi development with Maven 2.

Apache Directory Studio is based on Eclipse RCP and the last time i checked the build was completely Maven-based. the source repo is here. but there is still some reduncancy in the POM files.

but ... even if maven provides quality integration for OSGi bundles, the die-hards will still not want to use Maven. nowadays it's not 'fashionable' anymore to use Maven.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Tetsuo — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:56:38 -0000

I really like maven, because it makes it simple to setup your project (no jar hunting on multiple sites), and because of its conventions (dir structure, build sequence, etc.) and a 'right way' to do things. This is priceless, if you consider that a project will not stay forever in the hands of its original developers, or that you (well, your employer) have not one project, but dozens.

An experienced Maven user have no problem understanding the structure and build of a project, even if it isn't his. Even the most experienced Ant users will have problems understanding some Ant scripts, because each project has a different dir structure, a different way to deal with dependencies, different target names, and many have a rather intricate logic (which often is caused by lazyness of moving files around as the project goes, creating a hack in the build script is much easier).

But it does have flaws.

I agree with you that there should be some way to check the dependencies into the source control (optional, but should be there). Maybe by replicating the local repository in a source folder (src/main/lib?) or in a special module, automaticaly updated by the build cycle. Tools could warn you if jars don't match with their checksums at the local/remote repositories. One should be able to check out the source and build with no special configuration required (corporate repositories, for example).

And, some things are just easier to do with Ant. Fortunately, you can easily call/embed ant scripts into the maven build cycle.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

ahoehma — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:17:58 -0000

I'm a maven user! Yes I'm! :-D

Putting jar files in a project-lib-dir and committed these binaries to the source control will only work in a one-men-show-project! This will *never* work in a team and will *never* produce clean/maintainable/tested software -> with other words "quality is impossible". That's my experience in the last years.

I' our company we're developing more than one project, eclipse stuff and web stuff. The eclipse-crew is using the "oldstyle" eclipse headless build (ant based). We cool guys from the web-crew ;) using maven (*harrr*).

I tried many times to count the PRO's of maven. But always the eclipse-guru says "hmm ... ok that's nice what maven can do but we can customize (HACK!) our ant-script to do the same thing too" *lol* ... its frustrating to hear such comments ...

Maven will have a bright future! The basic concept of dependency-MANAGEMENT is wonderful, the repository-idea (locale, remote) works perfect. The usage of repository-manager (nexus) will improve the performance of our development-team and reduce the internet-traffic to a minimum. The release/snapshot cycle comes from XP.

I hope to see osgi packaging with maven very soon. Then the eclipse-crew have no chance ;)

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Vinod — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:45:19 -0000

IMHO polluting the source code repository with external libraries is a terrible idea, they must be stored separately. Though it is true that Maven fails to download dependencies several time and annoys developers but this can be avoided/reduced by use of repository managers. Benefits of Maven become more visible with large teams and big project eco-systems.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Noah Zucker — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:06:36 -0000

To those complaining about Maven "downloading the Internets."

Guess what: you can define a repository that is in SCM with along with your sources, and have your pom obtain its dependencies from that pom. In other words, Maven supports your project having something like a "lib" directory that contains jars (but with all the convention goodness of the Maven repo structure)

See:

http://stubbisms.wordpress....

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Stefan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:19:26 -0000

i know, i encountered your post some time ago.
I didn't have the intention to start another discussion here. i just wanted to ventilate my frustration about uninformed decision making.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Stefan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:09:40 -0000

yes, that's one of the reasons why i wouldn't use it yet although it has many obviuos advantages on maven.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

janick — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:53:24 -0000

We do not manage 400 deps, I think we're at 100 right now, and it is working really well (without using svn:externals). As you say the disjoint nature of many projects would make it impractical to consolidate deps in subtrees and us svn:externals. That is why we made each project responsible to manage its own dependencies, and pull in new deps or upgrade a jar in its own pace.

About the question for the non-maven crowd:
That is a very good question. This is a scenario that maven handles well IMO. I do not have an answer for this using my build setup.

BTW why isn't it enough to run the testcases for B to know that it would break A? Is it because the interface of B is not stable yet? Is it necessary to make it 2 different projects from the start, or could you harvest B from A after interfaces stabilized?

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Lieven Doclo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:11:31 -0000

http://www.insaneprogrammin...

... 'nuff said.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

MavenMaven — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:57:09 -0000

This is great point Gabriel.

For me, I think I can honestly say that learning Maven taught me so much about the right way to build software that learning Maven was killing two birds with one stone. Not only do I know how to manage dependency hell and multi module projects but I have a nice little set of rails to prevent me from going off track.

If I already knew the things Maven taught me it would probably be a major pain to tweak it into the Maven process. The ugly thing is outside of Maven, there is no "way" to build software. It's something that starts off with "compile this" and over a year or two turns into something that takes thorough understanding, even if that tool is simpler to understand.

So by learning Maven, which to your point Gabriel not an immediate "a-ha", I've learned how to build thousands of projects that have good practices enforced and don't have to worry about forgetting those practices over the years. That leaves me more time to concentrate on developing my project.

And it's not really that difficult anymore. Tons of plug-ins, thousands of examples, now awesome documentation (especially with the sonatype books) and lots of momentum make starting up pretty good if you start out with an open mind rather than retrofitting what you might expect into the paradigm.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

MavenMaven — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:42:58 -0000

Sorry this may be a stupid question, but could you explain what you mean by saying there's no incremental compilation. Maven only recompiles touched files the way Ant always did for me. I use Eclipse which builds as soon as I hit save so I don't have to drop down to command line very often for individual compilations. Also, have you looked at Maven CLI? It's unfortunately a few lines of setup but it may get you some speed back if you re-run goals without modifying the pom frequeently.

I've also had problems with Cobertura/Hudson on a Maven build but that boiled down to Cobertura plugin for Hudson being buggy. One update actually made my project vanish. So I feel your pain on the Cobertura/Hudson, but the other Maven/Hudson features are really awesome for me. It's like it was made for Maven

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

MavenMaven — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:31:10 -0000

Anti maven rants make me want to poop in people's garbage can just to fight fire with fire. They're so childish.

Seriously, do you have problems downloading from repositories? I've been using Maven for three years and had this problem once, when the internet was down at my company. Let me sever your network connection and let's see how you get the latest copy of Spring? Or checkout your 32Mb project form your SCM. I'll prefer to checkout the 300k of source that I'm working on and use the same copy of Spring that's already loaded in my local repository.

For the record I've never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER... had a problem connecting to central. And once you run the build once, you never have to connect again. That's never ever,ever,ever,ever,ever,ever,ever,ever,ever.

Now here's something that Ant script can't do for you, tell me which of those 50 libs aren't actually being used (dependency:analyze). Tell me why I have some funky XML parser in my lib directory (depencency:tree). Or how about visit 50 websites and extracting 50 zips for 50 libs vs copy/pasting some XML from jarvana.com.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

Gabriel — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:39:08 -0000

TO tell the truth, i don't like maven especially because of the reason the architecte gave you. He does not have the answer and You have it. To be good at Maven you need to study it for month and month and years. Then , everything becomes a piece of cake.
But.... Why must it be so difficult? Why such a pain? Why the infortation is all over the world in the internet? Why do i have to configure every little thing to have a result? etc. Too much magic for me, sorry, i m just a human trying to develop a software, not a maven guy specialized in what he does. Why must it be so difficult?

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

nairb774 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:59:42 -0000

I work on a team of about 12 developers and we use maven for our build system. We own over 400 jars. I have a hard time fathoming how one would go about updating dependencies across all of those projects. Even if you did tricks like using svn:externals to consolidate your dependencies into sub-trees, the disjoint nature of many of our projects would make it painful. How would you go about managing this in an ant world? We just use dependency management in a single file to control dependencies throughout all of our projects.

I have a question for the non-maven crowd - say you have jars A and B which are both in heavy development and A depends on B. Is it expected that the person working on A would capture snapshot builds of B and commit them every hour as new builds come out? If B makes a change that breaks A, how long till B knows? Assume that these are jars owned by separate teams, in separate projects.

If B is making snapshot deployments with maven, the very next build done on A will pull down the most recent build of B. This tied into a good CI system like Hudson, and the developers of B know within minutes of their check in that they broke A - all automatic. This instant feed back has helped our team a lot in the last year.

I know maven really well (maybe too well) but I don't know much about the other systems so I ask hoping to learn.

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

erisch — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:34:39 -0000

I'd say it's not only a consequence of using Ant. In large part it's because nobody has ever cared. I just suppose that a Maven-style way of managing dependencies would have encouraged to take care for dependencies.

Btw. it's unfortunately not "bad test coverage" but instead "NO test coverage". That's of course not the fault of any build tool but sadly the truth.

Marco

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

janick — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:28:55 -0000

"No one has ever tried to update a dependency to get newer features or bug fixes etc. soon after the project as become a little bit more complex."

Is that the consequence of using ANT as a build tool, or is it the result of not having good test coverage?

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

erisch — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:27:26 -0000

"I didn't. What I do say now is that it sure is not harder."

OK, then I misunderstood that point. Which still is different is to keep dependencies inside the POM or inside the SCM. But after all I think that's what most of the discussion here is about :-)

"That is a bit unfair isn't it?"

Maybe this was a bit unfair. After thinking about this whole discussion I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the problems, advantages or disadvantages of one tool over another depends on the people who use it. Unfortunately it's often easy to use a tool correctly but it's equally easy to misuse any tool. This probably is one big reason for a lot of debate here. If you have a disciplined team who cares about all that stuff there's probably nothing wrong to manage your dependencies just inside your SCM. If you don't you'll be happy to explicitly control your dependencies in a central place inside the POM.

Marco

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

janick — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:16:49 -0000

Marco, read my comment again:
I said: "upgrading/downgrading is as easy as deleting the old jar and adding the new one" did I say that it was easier than changing a number in a POM?

I didn't. What I do say now is that it sure is not harder.

"YOU think it's easier because YOU are used to it" -> That is a bit unfair isn't it?

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

janick — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:08:18 -0000

Dependency management hell? Never had problemens managing those dependencies. Could you elaborate on that?

Yes we keep the dependencies in source control. Why not? There is really nothing wrong with it. You should try it!

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

erisch — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:41:45 -0000

Don't get me wrong, I clearly said in my comments that Maven is far from perfect! And I'd be willing to use better tools like Gradle instead. In particular Gradle looks really nice but as long as IDEs and other tools like CI server don't support it as well as Maven that doesn't help me. If this would change some day I'd be glad to use any other tool which works better than Maven. But in the meantime Maven is the necessary evil as Peter pointed out.

Of course you are free to use any tool you like. Obviously you can't see why I like Maven. So I guess I'm a Maven fan and you are not, but that's OK for me. I just don't understand statements like "it's been very hard to get Cobertura and Hudson working with Maven" just because it was hard to get it working for YOU. For me this worked quite well so it doesn't seem to be a general problem with Maven.

Marco

Re: Maven and the (anti-) Hype

erisch — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:33:37 -0000

@Stefan: Forget it! I've hardly seen any discussion like this where the Ant fans came up with some impartial arguments. Even if you acknowledge the weaknesses of Maven there's no way for a fertile discussion.

I personally think Gradle looks like a promising alternative but currently IDE and tool support for Maven based projects is simply far ahead.

Marco