Time to become a Maven?

I was afraid to post about the fact that we have not moved over all my builds to maven, but i saw that the iBatis team only recently moved. And anyway, last year at a Java conference, the presenter about Maven talked about how only recently had the Maven folks gotten their act together to the point where he was not pulling out his hair over new jars that appeared and changed dependencies happening without his knowing. (I really hate things that happen without my knowing!)

I will start by saying that all our current projects are happily using Ant. We have built some pretty nice scripts to create a full build that include using svn (subclipse) to get the latest version of our code, up the version in the manifest, commit, create a tag, and copy the file to the distribution location. Additionally, the start of a project by our small teams have usually been through a project started in an IDE, (Intellij), and after we have something running, we then take our project and create an ant build, using our existing scripts. So, using maven does not easily fit this model since at this point we already have an existing structure. But everybody is doing it nowadays, so we cant easily dismiss it.

So, we have done a few projects starting with Maven. And of course, it meant we had to break our methodology described above. We used Maven to create the original infrastructure for the project as well as the project file for Intellij. And, as the project would progress and added more dependencies, it seems that the simplest way to move forward was not to add the dependencies to the project in Intellij, but to fix the POM and then have maven regenerate the project file. I believe this is fixed in the latest version of Intellij where it knows how to sync with the POM.

So, what are my conclusions?

First of all, the documentation needs improvement! But, notwithstanding that, I think it makes sense to use Maven to create new projects and this will mean that you will have a simple structure where it is obvious where to put all your additional resources, config files. The alternative would be that we need to keep worrying about these “copy” lines in my ant file.

But the power of ant to do what you want, and use legacy processes (like our use of JWSDP 1.6) would mean that we still want ant in our build process. Luckily this is possible, as I saw here.

Of course, Ant will remain a key tool for us as i use it to run apps and more easily build classpaths and pass params to it than alternatives that I know of. And as a big believer in “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, i dont see us moving our old applications to Maven.