I Use This!
Activity Not Available

Ratings and Reviews

Analyzed 3 months ago. based on code collected over 4 years ago.
Community Rating
4.08091
   

Average Rating:   4.1/5.0
Number of Ratings:   309
Number of Reviews:   7

My Review of Apache Maven 2

You have not rated or reviewed this project.
Click below to rate/review.
My Rating:
0
 
 New Review

Most Helpful Reviews

rds says:
Good java developers use Maven  
4.0
   
written over 16 years ago

Maven provides conventions to manage the development (lifecycle, source layout). It also frees the programmer from managing library dependencies. The POM is an XML-ased object model which describes your project is the central piece to achieve this goal.

But Maven is terribly lacking documentation, and the repository of libraries is sometimes inconsistent (project object found in repo1.maven.org can depend on libraries from repo.codehasu.org).

2 out of 2 users found the following review helpful.

Did this review help you? |

jtukkine says:
Maven 2 helped to uniform Java p...  
4.0
   
written almost 17 years ago

Maven 2 helped to uniform my previous company's Java projects significantly. It enforces the use of same practices in every project starting from directory structure to the use of external components. Most importantly, moving a developer from a project to another was a bit less painful because of all this.

The main problems have related to disperse and sometimes outdated overall documentation and examples, poorly documented or "snapshot" must-use plugins and maven repository handling. All of these issues have been addressed lately - special thanks to the writers of the Maven 2 book!

Maven 2 is a significant upgrade in simplicity and usability compared to its predecessor Maven 1. However, it is still not crystal clear always how it handles its transitive dependencies of external components or how the build process actually works ;) Of course, the problem is not trivial.

Despite my slight criticism, I like to thank all the people working for Maven 2, it is a great project and I recommend it as a working solution to get your build process to a new level after Ant, Makefile - not to name custom shell scripts!

BR,

- jtukkine

Did this review help you? |

Gert Woh... says:
Maven2 experience and problems  
3.0
   
written over 15 years ago

well my experience with maven is like always not so that I'm happy with it or that I'm unhappy. I got kind of a shared feeling about this software.

A simple example, 7 years ago I started to develop a software which contains several sub modules, sub projects, j2ee components. Basically the usual suspects and I used ant to build all these tools.

Now the year 2008 came and we finally wanted to rewrite the build system since it became more and more complicated to maintain the ant build files.
This was the point when I decided to give maven another try. And it worked well, for parts of it and not so well for other parts.

Basically if you have a simple project with some sub modules and don't do fancy stuff. It works perfectly!

But more about this here:

What I really learned to appreciate was that it keeps every project in the same structure. If you know one maven project, you know them all.
This is a huge plus, since it get's you started much faster with new projects!

Also very nice was the dependency management, at least if you were able to find a repository which has the needed dependencies available. Sadly this is very often not the case or only outdated versions of the dependency. So you end up setting up your own repository for just the libraries which are not available. Once you done this you are very happy for a couple of days...

Now comes the annoying part with maven, you encounter weird problems.
For example, some builds are failing all the time because a sub module is not found. This is particularly the case for projects which have a lot of sub modules, which have even more sub modules.

The workaround?

You go into the directory and build this module + install it. Once you have done this the whole system works again and you can build all you modules again, till you need to update this particularly module.

Which means you write a small shell script which sits in front of maven, till there is a fix available, or you join the project and try to fix it yourself, but sadly I had no time for this so far.

To make things short, maven is still pretty buggy. Which leads to the conclusion that the testing of the software is not perfect.
Now that does not have to be related to the software maven itself. I guess it's more related to the plugins which are available for maven. But should it be really possible for a plugin to break the dependency management of the build system?

I mean I love the concept of the plugins!
Example would be that you want to write you main code with java and for testing and web stuff you use grails/groovy. So you google how todo this and see some wonderful people already wrote a plugin for you! So maven has a very active community and a lot of plugins for nearly all problems. Another big +

Another issue I encountered was that maven tends to break it self with newer version. For example a build which works fine with maven 2.0.5 does not necessarily work with 2.0.9 since 2.0.9 introduced a bug in the release.
I mean shouldn't software be compatible to older versions? Specially if it's not a major release?

After all I love maven and I would never use ant again to build software. The benefits of maven are just to high compared to ant. But I would love it, if I could fight the system a little bit less and things would just work as they are expected.

So can I recommend maven?

this for sure!

Did this review help you? |

ashcrow says:
Best Java Build Tool, But ...  
2.0
   
written over 15 years ago

It's something that you have to stay on top of. A lot of distributions don't package maven 2 and you have to remember that minor releases don't always keep full backwards compatibility. Building from the Maven 2 source doesn't always work depending on the release which makes things a bit tougher for those who would like to offer maven 2 through normal channels.

A lot of shops seem to internally package up binary only versions of maven 2 and then standardized on that version. I've talked with a lot of people who still use maven 2.0.4 so their plugins, custom plugins and packaging continue to work.

With all that being said, it's the best out there for Java.

Did this review help you? |

erich says:
Maven 2  
0.0
 
written almost 14 years ago

very complex software, I barely figured out

Did this review help you? |

Most Recent Reviews

sfohart says:
Very useful!  
5.0
 
written over 10 years ago

Very useful to manage my projects, generate packages, documentation...

Did this review help you? |

morganv says:
Maven 2  
0.0
 
written almost 14 years ago

certainly a leader in its field

Did this review help you? |

erich says:
Maven 2  
0.0
 
written almost 14 years ago

very complex software, I barely figured out

Did this review help you? |

ashcrow says:
Best Java Build Tool, But ...  
2.0
   
written over 15 years ago

It's something that you have to stay on top of. A lot of distributions don't package maven 2 and you have to remember that minor releases don't always keep full backwards compatibility. Building from the Maven 2 source doesn't always work depending on the release which makes things a bit tougher for those who would like to offer maven 2 through normal channels.

A lot of shops seem to internally package up binary only versions of maven 2 and then standardized on that version. I've talked with a lot of people who still use maven 2.0.4 so their plugins, custom plugins and packaging continue to work.

With all that being said, it's the best out there for Java.

Did this review help you? |

Gert Woh... says:
Maven2 experience and problems  
3.0
   
written over 15 years ago

well my experience with maven is like always not so that I'm happy with it or that I'm unhappy. I got kind of a shared feeling about this software.

A simple example, 7 years ago I started to develop a software which contains several sub modules, sub projects, j2ee components. Basically the usual suspects and I used ant to build all these tools.

Now the year 2008 came and we finally wanted to rewrite the build system since it became more and more complicated to maintain the ant build files.
This was the point when I decided to give maven another try. And it worked well, for parts of it and not so well for other parts.

Basically if you have a simple project with some sub modules and don't do fancy stuff. It works perfectly!

But more about this here:

What I really learned to appreciate was that it keeps every project in the same structure. If you know one maven project, you know them all.
This is a huge plus, since it get's you started much faster with new projects!

Also very nice was the dependency management, at least if you were able to find a repository which has the needed dependencies available. Sadly this is very often not the case or only outdated versions of the dependency. So you end up setting up your own repository for just the libraries which are not available. Once you done this you are very happy for a couple of days...

Now comes the annoying part with maven, you encounter weird problems.
For example, some builds are failing all the time because a sub module is not found. This is particularly the case for projects which have a lot of sub modules, which have even more sub modules.

The workaround?

You go into the directory and build this module + install it. Once you have done this the whole system works again and you can build all you modules again, till you need to update this particularly module.

Which means you write a small shell script which sits in front of maven, till there is a fix available, or you join the project and try to fix it yourself, but sadly I had no time for this so far.

To make things short, maven is still pretty buggy. Which leads to the conclusion that the testing of the software is not perfect.
Now that does not have to be related to the software maven itself. I guess it's more related to the plugins which are available for maven. But should it be really possible for a plugin to break the dependency management of the build system?

I mean I love the concept of the plugins!
Example would be that you want to write you main code with java and for testing and web stuff you use grails/groovy. So you google how todo this and see some wonderful people already wrote a plugin for you! So maven has a very active community and a lot of plugins for nearly all problems. Another big +

Another issue I encountered was that maven tends to break it self with newer version. For example a build which works fine with maven 2.0.5 does not necessarily work with 2.0.9 since 2.0.9 introduced a bug in the release.
I mean shouldn't software be compatible to older versions? Specially if it's not a major release?

After all I love maven and I would never use ant again to build software. The benefits of maven are just to high compared to ant. But I would love it, if I could fight the system a little bit less and things would just work as they are expected.

So can I recommend maven?

this for sure!

Did this review help you? |

 See all reviews