Comments on: Apache Maven: A Misbehavin’ Build Tool?

By: Duncan

Duncan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:39:52 +0000

Hi Simon, Yup, like most software, when it works its great. But when it goes pear-shaped, its a real pain. On a bad day I wonder if the benefit of Maven is really worth the (high) cost…

By: Simon Jupp

Simon Jupp — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:29:56 +0000

Hey Duncan. Funny you should mention Maven, I’ve just spent the last couple of weeks getting to grips with the Taverna codebase which is built using Maven. Its taken me about two weeks to write the code I needed and a large portion of that time was spent faffing around with Maven. I didn’t find any great introductory tutorials online, but once I “got it” I found it to be ok and the IntelliJ maven plugin is also quite good. These automated build tools are great when they simple work out of the box, but a complete nightmare do debug when they go wrong, especially when you’re trying to build a large project for the first time.

By: Janne

Janne — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:38:49 +0000

Thanks for using my picture – and even more thanks for telling me. I love finding out about new things, and up until know I had no idea Maven (or Ant) even existed.

By: Maven Sucks

Maven Sucks — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:23:08 +0000

Here’s how to show that the quote above is hiding something: More people use Ant than Maven (most definitely) – do we hear more Ant complaints or Maven? I’d say there are more complaints about Maven. Even if they had an equal user base, more complaints about Maven still makes it the loser overall.

By: Maven Sucks

Maven Sucks — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:19:14 +0000

That quote isn’t quite accurate, it’s not that simple. There are three types of languages/build tools/etc:

The ones everyone complains about A LOT
The ones everyone complains about once in a while
The ones nobody uses

In other words there’s the important detail of HOW WELL something performs, there are different degrees of success. Pointing out that nothing is *perfect* (as that quote was doing) is just rationalization.

By: nhaslam

nhaslam — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:32:33 +0000

I think its definitely worth the hassle for a project over a certain size. There may be disagreements over what exactly that size is – but I believe it would be impossible to deploy and share large projects with the dependency management that maven provides.

I’m always very happen to find that a particular library I want is available in a maven repo through eclipse. It just makes my life a lot easier when experimenting with new code. The EBI in particular are to be congratulated on the abdundance of libraries that are available through maven. It makes using their code a simple matter of clicking a few buttons in my favourite IDE.