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Showing posts from May, 2014

Maven's great, before you get annoyed with a feature, find out why it was implemented.

I have always liked Apache Maven, however I recently found a few issues with it that irritated me.  This post was going to moan about them, but after further reading I have come to realise that these issues are not as simple as I first thought.  They are in fact conscious decisions associated with a very complicated problem domain. Fist off, why is maven great? The best thing about maven is the standards it imposes on you.  This has the obvious downside of it feeling restrictive at times.  However, the benefits are huge.  The standard directory layout , standard build phases and of course the standard dependency management have been around so long now that we tend to take them for granted.  Unless a project uses custom or obscure plugins or overridden many default settings, each project looks and builds in a familiar way.  As mentioned on maven.apache.org, " ... [it's] only necessary to learn a small set of commands to build any Maven project ". It almost feels