Andy Grove's Blog

Over the past 6 months or so I have been working with some projects that have a Maven2 build system and other projects that use plain Ant build systems. I love the concepts behind Maven and see tremendous value in standardizing the build process across projects as well as having a better way of managing dependencies on third party jars without storing them in each project's source repository.

However, there are some pitfalls to be aware of before adopting Maven which may or may not be issues depending on your requirements.

First of all, adopting Maven will typically require a Maven server (repository) to be set up and maintained. For some smaller development departments this creates an extra IT support burden that can be avoided with an Ant build system.

Another potential issue is that third party projects might not have good support for Maven. For instance, another Apache project, Axis2, recently released version 1.4 but there is an open support ticket AXIS2-3069 regarding the Maven2 java2wsdl plugin which does not seem to be in a working state yet. The ticket has not been updated since 2007. Sure, the problem can be worked around by calling Ant from within the Maven2 project, but that's adding another layer of complexity compared to a standard Ant project.

Another issue that I have hit is that Maven2 has poor error reporting when it is unable to resolve a dependency. I eventually tracked my issue down to a java keystore / server certificate error but Maven didn't provide any hints that this was the problem, even with debug flags set.

Overall, I'm still a fan of Maven2 and I think the combination of Maven and Ant is extremely powerful but in my recent experience it does add extra cost to the development process.

Labels: java