Comments on: … and sometimes they don’t.

By: Mike Mills

Mike Mills — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:04:33 +0000

After working on some of those maven problems with you I know exactly where you are coming from. It wasnt until I did another Ant project again that I realised that Maven2 is failing becuase it no longer fulfills its original aim of “Convention over Configuration”

If something is to replace maven then it really needs to sort out the CoC idiom once and for all.

We went to maven to stop us having to replicate lots of custom build files, but if that is the case why did we have to create a company wide base POM, and why oh why are the poms still massive? and I am not just talking attributes vs elements here, we still have to add so much to the POM for ‘special’ cases that we end up back at square one, ie TOO much configuration!

My current gripe with maven is that the lifecycle is too inflexible, especially with test types. Just two types of test is a little narrow minded? Unit and Integration? how about configuration tests and inter system tests, the developer base application testing world has moved on, and maven is not flexible to cope with it.

(ps cool anti spam question)

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:43:34 +0000

Oh, for anyone else reading this – the Firefox issue has to do with how the Mac treats accessible fields. You can enable it for Firefox and all other apps by going to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse and setting “Full Keyboard Access” to “All Controls”

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:39:04 +0000

Thanks, Kristian – that’s (nearly) exactly what I wanted.

By: Kristian Domagala

Kristian Domagala — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:49:40 +0000

Off-topic to the main point of your post, but at the start you mentioned:
‘No “next/previous word” keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal’

If I understand you correctly, what you want to do is enable the Meta key in Terminal. From the Terminal menu, select Window Settings… -> Keyboard and there is a checkbox to use the Option key as the Meta key. With this enabled, you can use Option-f & Option-b to go forward and back one word respectively. (And of course it gives you the rest of the Meta- key bindings in Terminal Emacs!)

By: Kristian Domagala

Kristian Domagala — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:48:19 +0000

Off-topic to the main point of your post, but at the start you mentioned:
‘No “next/previous word” keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal’

By: Michael Neale

Michael Neale — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:22:11 +0000

The dysfunctional maven community is particularly bad. Because its dysfunctional for no reason at all that I can see (other then “chip on shoulder” as identified above).

Great idea, not so great execution. I think its been long enough to sort itself out, I kind of want to see an acrimonious fork happen now.

By: Christophe Vanfleteren

Christophe Vanfleteren — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:42:07 +0000

I feel your pain.

I was and still am responsible for the build system for my current project (which is pretty big: we have 5 webservices (each a seperate war), 2 jsf apps and 3 fully asynchronous headless apps, that are driven by jms). We have 15+ modules for the moment, and I’m sure there’s more to come.

Setting up the right configuration for all this wasn’t a walk in the park, but I do feel the same like you do:
the net result for the team is positive, but it took me quite some time to figure everything out, and I still feel it’s not 100% finished.

The instability of some plugins certainly is a problem: its only now, with surefire 2.4 that we can properly use Testng integration. We depended on the surefire snapshots for quite some time, which could break our build randomly now and then.

On the other hand, you do gain quite some functionality. Deploying with cargo is very nice, I do feel maven poms are more maintainable than equivalent ant scripts and it’s very easy to add another module to your project.

About your “exec” remark, doesn’t the maven exec plugin fill your need? See http://mojo.codehaus.org/exec-maven-plugin/introduction.html