Stefan Arentz

I’ve always tried to avoid using Maven for complex projects because I thought it would make my already complex build process even more ‘interesting’. I was wrong. Big time.

Yesterday and today I’ve setup many little Maven 2.0 projects for simple standalone tests with Spring and standard web applications. It is really nice to be able to get started so much faster.

I have also converted a small J2EE project to Maven 2.0 and it is really nice to see that with just a few lines of xml you can do a pretty complex build and package process. I usually have JEE projects with multiple web applications, custom modules and many dependencies. Maven handles those really well. Not only that, Maven 2.0 also makes things like publishing JUnit reports really simple.

The documentation on their web site is pretty limited. There are a lot of mini chapters available but not a really good guide on how to really get started. I’m always a big fan of concrete recipes.

But there is hope, I just found Better Builds with Maven on the Mergere web site. The E-Book (PDF) is written by the people behind Maven 2.0 and although they write in the preface that it is just an introduction, it touches many subjects that are simply nowhere else to find. In a good 277 pages.

These guys do need to work on their PR though; the book is basically impossible to find. A link on the Maven web site would probably help.