tfnico's blog

I noticed via @jvanzyl that Kent R. Spillner has been taking apart Maven and some of its features in a recent rant . The twittersphere has shown support for Kent's views - and being the Maven fan I am , I figured I'd take some time to try countering his post a bit (forgive me if this post is a bit unstructured, I'm trying to squeeze it out under some time pressure). "The best build tool is the one you write yourself..." I think this first paragraph contains a lot of absolute statements that happen to be false in a lot of cases. My experience is that a lot of projects or modules are built the same way. It's a bunch of source code, and in the end you end up with a JAR-file. We've got a 25 module web application at work, and I just mavenized the whole thing from Ant. All of the modules exlucding the final web-app module itself were easily built with Maven. Nobody says that every module in the world is built this way, but it sure is a lot. Java code goes in,...