I really fail at understanding the XML rage. Yeah it's verbose. How's that a problem? We've had tools with auto complete, auto format and syntax highlighting for well over a decade, we also now have fairly robust GUIs too. If you're hand editing a 2000 line xml file in a green screen terminal you're doing the equivalent of using an abacus and I'm afraid you're not the user new tools ought to be aimed at.
XML has a huge ubiquity value. It might not be the *best* tool for the job for each individual user but it's the only one that is widely enough understood to not put an additional learning burden on the user. When I learned Maven I had to grok concepts like dependencyManagement and plugins and phases. I didn't have to learn XML, I already knew it. If Maven POMs were written in Python or A.N.Other language/markup I'd have to learn that too. There are many useful libraries that make it easier to produce GUI tools on top of XML that don't exist for alternatives, so we'd have less tooling for POMs. Tooling and minimising the learning required are good things. The _actual_ problem I see is the lack of "best practise" use for plugins off the beaten track. The documentation is usually fairly good at telling you how to make a plugin do something, it's less than brilliant at recommending best practises and unless it's one of the mainstream ones covered by the sonatype book it's hard to find. I've found the best thing to do in those cases is go look at large, open source projects and see how they do it. Ken's original problem in this thread (and the others he's been getting help with on the scala list) are _nothing_ to do with XML, that is just the target of frustration. They would have happened regardless of the language for POM specification. For us, Maven's killed about 12,000 lines of ant legacy built up over a few years, and also done a drive by on a couple of dozen ivy files, replacing them with one medium size POM declaring dependency versions, a dozen small ones declaring dependencies, and a bunch of minimal ones - all with NO bespoke build instructions in. Using nexus has killed the need to maintain an internal ivy repository which was a real pain in the rear, and we can now easily share deliverables with the other couple of hundred developers we have working in the same technologies around the globe. It's been very painless by comparison to what we were doing before and well worth the switchover. Regards Brian On 15 October 2010 08:56, <mremerson...@aim.com> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 3:00 am, Jason van Zyl wrote: > >> A fact to note though is that I've asked over 2k people over the last > two years at talks and in any average crowd the people who care to have a > different format or DSL is around 3%. > > And I one of them :-) I always havent been a friend of XML and I happy to > see the possibilities maven3 offers (although I prefer using gradle - > bygones) > > What I'm wondering most is - why the heck do you write to the maven > mailinglist how you dislike maven ? Is your intention to convince people > that they are doing bad stuff over the last xxx years ? Is it just pure > boredness ? > > I dont like Ruby or Clojure - what is the reason to bother the ruby/clojure > mailing list that their syntax is apparently horrible ? > > Sorry - I dont get it... If you dont like maven - dont use it... there are > tons of alternatives around. > > Or what point do I miss here ? > > >
