Maven 2

After using Ant as the primary build tools for several years, I decided to give Maven a try. Ant has been a great tool. As a software lead, I had used it in a Rail Risk Assessment project with a sizable federal grants. The winning point for Ant was at the time, I could incorporate automatic Unit and Integration tests into the build process....something that was rather alien to the group that hired me.

Whenever I have questions on Ant, I seek the vast Google resources or perhaps even the personal connection. I also happen to know the author of the authoritative Oreilly book on Ant, Erik H. His children and mine happen to go the same private elementary school here in town.

Now that I am in Maven land for several years, I could not believe that I have not jumped into the bandwagon earlier. I remembered my maiden Java journey in 1999 taking the class and compiling all the source codes through the command-line. Boy, they were painful. Managing the classpath to all the required JAR(s) is not for the faint of heart.

And then came, the JBuilder, and then IBM, the heavyweight, chips in with Eclipse. And voila, suddenly, IDE makes those pains go away and Java development could be fun again.

Of course, with every story, there is always the ups and downs. While Eclipse has been the IDE of choice, it comes with its own problems. Go to the official website, then you are presented with a plethora of choices. What frameworks and languages do you want to work with?! J2SE, J2EE?! C++?! or perhaps even PHP or Ruby?!

After that, you need to make sure that you have the right plug-ins so that you can move on with your development goal. For the J2EE, you most likely need the plug-ins to Tomcat, Jetty web-server, JBoss AS and various DB connectors.

Now, at the beginning of the Oracle/PeopleSoft project in 2005, I begin to use the UNIX utilities quite extensively from the BASH script to the Perl and Ruby. And, I realize that command-line is not something to shy away from. With that newfound rigor, I started to wonder whether there is something new in the Java-world that alleviate those pains that I remember earlier in my Java journey.

One thing led to the next, I come across Maven 2 and never even look back. Yes, as with any tools, there is a learning curve. There are certain conventions that you need to be familiar with and to follow to use Maven to its potential. And yes, you would make mistakes. But, trust me, those are the mistakes worth learning from.