I am using maven for my current project, and I think it is (conceptually) an ideal system for a multi-faceted project like jboss. The caveat to my comments is I have only used maven for one project, and I am only using it for its artifact generation, not for building a distribution. I think maven offers jboss 3 possible benefits: 1. The Maven Repository Jboss should/would have to maintain a repository to contain all of the 3rd party jars required for the maven build (maven's default is located at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/ and the structure is required). The payoff is excellent control over which libraries are used. Jars are referenced in the project.xml based on version and vendor name, so experimenting with new versions of these 3rd party libs is easy and non-destructive. Keeping jars in cvs is similar but not as clean (not to mention a complete waste of cvs resources). Maven keeps a local repository updated by checking on each build for any new required jars. The repository would provide a much more maintainable asset than the current 3rd party lib structure, and allow central control over jboss libs. Of course, maven's current repository doesn't have nearly all the jars used in the jboss project, so Jboss would have to either coordinate with maven/ibiblio or host an alternative repo somewhere. For our project, I wrote an ant task to copy all the jar files specified in my eclipse dot-classpath file to the repository and generate a properly structure dependency list for our project.xml file. A little backwards, I know...
2. Consistent Set of Project Artifacts The maven site:generate goal publishes a useful website containing everything from mailing list lists to cvs changelogs to unit test reports (which unfortunately use a stylesheet much inferior to the current jboss tests...). The site is a terrific asset, and would, I think, fill a hole in the current jboss community. 3. maven has excellent development momentum Maven is highly extensible, and can easily absorb and re-use pre-existing ant tasks. The motivation for us to move to maven was the "free" site generation -- by writing one project.xml, we get a testsuite report, cvs log reports, source analysis, checkstyle report, todo list etc. I think the payoff for maintaining a project.xml file will continue to increase as the build and distribute process is also improved, and as more tools produce goals. All that being said, Maven is not quite fully baked yet and I found myself spending a lot of time "tinkering" with properties files and environment variables because come behavior was not as expected. Also, I had to reconfigure my directory structure in order to successfully use maven -- a small task for our project, but much more involved, I suspect, for jboss. One problem I encountered was specifying more than one source directory. Instead of doing so in the project.xml file, you have to mess with poorly documented properties in a project.properties file (or one of the other chain of properties files). If I were in any position to make a recommendation, I would suggest porting a subproject to maven and testing it out a little. Hope this is useful, fawce -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of David Jencks Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 12:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [JBoss-user] [OS] JBoss/EJB build systems - Xdoclet with Ant, Maven, Centipede? On 2003.02.10 11:57 Darren Hartford wrote: > Hi All, > Been using Ant and Xdoclet, great tools, makes my life a LOT easier > than good-ol' writing interfaces on my own :-) > > I have started migrating to the Maven build system, to support more > project management features, auto javadoc creation and deployment, > changelog, blah blah blah. I know you can do all these things with > Ant (I used to do that). Looking to the Jboss community to see where > everyone else is going, experiences, etc. Maven/xDoclet integration > requires community support and dev, and would like opinions/feedback > if anyone else is going this route? I haven't been able to figure out why Maven is better than plain ant. Can you explain? Would it be appropriate to use Maven to build jboss? > > p.s. Is the Jboss-Xdoclet going to be a seperate module controlled by > JBoss and available through a JBoss controlled location, or still > retrieved through xDoclet? That's the plan, but there are 2 problems atm: 1. I haven't been able to get xdoclet to build reliably as part of the jboss build process. I think but can't prove that this has to do with the buildmagic tasks not keeping up with changes in ant. 2. No one (AFAIK) has stepped forward to say "I will maintain the jboss xdoclet stuff in jboss" Right now it is sort of possible to build xdoclet as part of jb4 but the normal version is checked into cvs. david jencks > > thanks, just looking for some discussion > -D > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.NET email is sponsored by: > SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld > http://www.vasoftware.com > _______________________________________________ > JBoss-user mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-user > > ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ JBoss-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-user ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ JBoss-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-user
