Does anyone know of a good emotional support group for people trying to
use Maven with Typesafe projects such as Akka and Play?
I was thinking maybe there could a buddy/sponsor system, such as used in
AA and other self help groups. Maybe there might be group sessions where
people can talk about their trauma, especially by being constantly
invalidated by comments such as "you should use the simple build tool
SBT, cause, well you know, it's simple and easy to use."
Seriously though, is there a community of people who are successfully
using Maven with Akka an Play projects? I would love to meet you.
I can see why people who have tried Maven naturally think "oh, its' too
complicated, anyone can write a simple build tool that does what Maven
does." Clearly they do not appreciate what Maven is or what it does. SBT
and Gradle are two great examples of projects that attempted to do
something more simple, but in the end, really don't measure up.
I personally think the Scala community would be been better served if
more investment was made in developing better Scala build tools within
the Maven framework. More and better plugins for Scala, Akka, Play,
etc. Better use of
http://books.sonatype.com/mcookbook/reference/sect-scala-script-inline.html
http://books.sonatype.com/mcookbook/reference/ch03s03.html
I don't know if there is a Scala template for writing Maven plugins (or
mojos), but there should be.
The more I use SBT, the less I like it. It is not what I consider a
serious build tool for build engineers, it is a toy or playground for
Scala hackers who thrive on the abstruse. Don't get me wrong, I love
Scala, but creating a build tool around .scala files just invites the
use of chicken tracks and obscure overly concise cleverness that leads
to one WTF experience after another. /It is actually possible to write
Scala code that you can reason about,/ but it just as easy to write
Scala code that resembles APL, and reasoning about build engineering was
clearly not a priority with the designers of SBT.
The Scala-IDE was a really great approach because it leveraged off of an
existing IDE infrastructure such as Eclipse, rather than trying to write
an IDE from scratch the way SBT does. I wish the Scala/Typesafe
community had taken the same approach with build-tools.
- Eric
