[Gllug] [OT] Maven alikes

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 11:55:22AM +0100, Richard wrote:
> I'm poking about Maven and its associated plugins to almost everything 
> source code, or Java, related. Can I canvas opinion about what people 
> think of Maven, and other tools that help to automate software project 
> management. Is there anything else out there that seeks to tie together 
> all the different tools around source code, (documentation, testing, 
> build, quality metrics, etc.)? One of my gripes is that Maven becomes 
> your build tool, which makes me uncomfortable.

And its the build tool bits which are arguably the most flawed bit of 
Maven. I examined whether it was possible to use it on a very large
project, and discovered its fundaementally flawed, by *intentional
design* which the developers explictly still stand by! Basically, it
assumes that any single project is only going to be working with one
source code module, and thus only creating one utlimate JAR. So, if
your project is soo large that you have split up source into multiple
dependant modules & wish to create many jars from them, you can't use
Maven :-(

> In the specific case I'm thinking of, there's a very large government 
> department, with awful development practices. I'm hoping to bring them 
> out of the 1950s, and allow them to build better (big) projects. Believe 
> it or not, I actually would like to see taxes spent more effectively... 
> This is a work related enquiry for me, but I expect/hope that it may be 
> of general interest to others here.

Regardless of what you use for documentation, build, and quality metries
the automation of your processses is the key. To that end I maintain a
project Test-AutoBuild which provides an end-to-end workflow for automating
builds. It goes from source code checkout, build order determination,
through build, package & test, then to publish status pages & generated
packages / build artifacts to a web / ftp sites. Test-AutoBuild is just
a framework for tieing other tools together - it doesn't attempt to lock
you into a particular technology - for builds, it just invokes a shell 
script you provide which can call Make / Ant / Maven / etc as you require.
Likewise it doesn't require you to generate RPMs - its more than happy
finding .debs, tar.gz, etc. Nor does it lock you into Java - its happy
with you using any language.

 http://www.autobuild.org/

In particular this page may be of interest

  http://www.autobuild.org/architecture/build-env.html

And of course there is a demo

  http://demo.autobuild.org/

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
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|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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