On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 10:10 AM Lisa Ruby <lbru...@protonmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> For those of you who have used Maven for a long time it may seem simple > and straightforward, but for those of us who haven't it's not. I've > struggled to try and understand it and figure out how to use it for my > software project and gave up. And it's a huge amount of overhead, extra > disk space usage, and more bits and pieces to keep track of that isn't > justifiable for small simple projects. ANT works just fine for me, and I > will keep using it for as long as I possibly can. I need to focus my time > on getting my software out, not on the tools I have to use to do it. > There are several issues, depending on your project. If you have a "simple" Ant project, it's mostly a matter of copying your code over, resolving the dependencies (i.e. correlating the libraries you use to the ones in the repository), and building. The singular "huge" amount of overhead for Maven is the large index that's routinely downloaded from Maven Central, cataloging all of the available libraries. It's a large download that's uncompressed on the file system (> 1GB). Outside of that, Maven is lightweight. Ant is faster, to be sure, but Maven is "fast enough" for most cases. For complicated projects, anything goes. Maven is a declarative system. "This is what I want done" vs Ants imperative system "This is what I want to do". There is an absolute paradigm mismatch between the two, but that does not mean it's not reconcilable. The other side of the coin is that, technically, this isn't the place for converting Ant to Maven. That's a "Ant" problem or "Maven" problem, not necessarily an IDE problem. That said, perhaps we could get a write up on someone going through the process on some of the common NB Ant projects to show how it's done. An automated system would likely be more complicated and less effective than a list of steps and heuristics that someone can go through. No ideal, to be sure. If you'd like to contact me directly with specifics about your project, maybe I can help you prototype a project transition. That said, as I mentioned in the other thread, I don't think that NB should give up legacy support of such projects, just perhaps deprecating the "new projects". Regards, Will Hartung
