Unfortunately most people seem to hate it. Maybe thats just my bias because I tried it and found it a complete pain in the ass to work with. I dont like supposed development aides thats want to tell me how I should organise everything to suit its quirks rather than my preferences. Its really irritating when this demands vast amounts of configuration to achieve and requires a scripting language who creator has apologised for creating an abomination.
Think I (and many others) will stick with ant for the time being
Well, what do you expect? That is its purpose, managing your development. I personally abstracted ant scripts where you can define where the files in properties. Then it is a matter of policy and taste where to put the files.
Unfortunately most people seem to hate it. Maven mailing list(s) is one of the most active ones, with +50 messages a day. Most articles and comments at ServerSide, IBM DeveloperWorks and elsewhere are quite favorable toward it. Many major projects (e.g. Geronimo) are using it.
I dont like supposed development aides thats want to tell me how I should organise everything to suit its quirks rather than my preferences. Maven follows well established practices (e.g. directory structure) from the Apache Jakarta projects. Accustomed to Ant's freedom, I also was unhappy with some defaults/behaviors initially, but gradually all of them made sense.
Its really irritating when this demands vast amounts of configuration to achieve I interpret this to mean that attempting to implement your quirks in Maven took vast amount of configuration to achieve, and have no objection to that. Another massive configuration effort is required when an existing complex and rather quirky Ant build of a large application is migrated to Maven (as it was in my case, I should mention that I wrote also the Ant build;-)). But starting with Maven on a common medium-sized app is relatively easy when using the GenApp plugin [apache.org].
requires a scripting language who creator has apologised for creating an abomination I agree here. I also do not like the idea of executable XML, of using XML as a programming language. Please note, however, that Jelly is an interface for tags in Maven used to implement plugins. In principle, any mechanism for embedding tags will do (and there is significant work in this direction for v2 AFAIK).
So, apart from personal taste, Maven is quite a solid production-ready project build and comprehension tool.
Its a love it or hate it project (Score:3, Insightful)
Think I (and many others) will stick with ant for the time being
Re:Its a love it or hate it project (Score:2)
Re:Its a love it or hate it project (Score:5, Informative)
Maven mailing list(s) is one of the most active ones, with +50 messages a day. Most articles and comments at ServerSide, IBM DeveloperWorks and elsewhere are quite favorable toward it. Many major projects (e.g. Geronimo) are using it.
I dont like supposed development aides thats want to tell me how I should organise everything to suit its quirks rather than my preferences.
Maven follows well established practices (e.g. directory structure) from the Apache Jakarta projects. Accustomed to Ant's freedom, I also was unhappy with some defaults/behaviors initially, but gradually all of them made sense.
Its really irritating when this demands vast amounts of configuration to achieve
I interpret this to mean that attempting to implement your quirks in Maven took vast amount of configuration to achieve, and have no objection to that.
Another massive configuration effort is required when an existing complex and rather quirky Ant build of a large application is migrated to Maven (as it was in my case, I should mention that I wrote also the Ant build
But starting with Maven on a common medium-sized app is relatively easy when using the GenApp plugin [apache.org].
requires a scripting language who creator has apologised for creating an abomination
I agree here. I also do not like the idea of executable XML, of using XML as a programming language. Please note, however, that Jelly is an interface for tags in Maven used to implement plugins. In principle, any mechanism for embedding tags will do (and there is significant work in this direction for v2 AFAIK).
So, apart from personal taste, Maven is quite a solid production-ready project build and comprehension tool.
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Svetlin