Maven Frustration
Browsing Howard Lewis Ship’s blog I came across a short post on his maven frustrations:
I still like the concept of the repository and the transitive dependencies; that aspect of Maven is worthwhile, but as a build tool, it sucks up far more time and energy than it saves. Possibly an order of magnitude more.
I’ve always had those same sort of frustrations with maven often due to a lack of clear documentation. Browsing through the shrinking computer section at Borders I chanced upon the O’Reilly maven book and with a 40% off coupon went ahead and picked it up.
In my current organization they were an early adopter of maven. Yes, that means we are running maven 1.0 in all its glory. Maven 1.0 was a failed experiment and led to a “complete rewrite”. We’re using maven 2 for new projects, but we’ll have some pain in making the migration for a number of older projects.
I just want to jump in and get some things done. With ant or rake this was easy. With maven it involved searching for documentation or looking for plugins to see if they existed. I’m really hoping the Sonatype book fixes that issue. It has a free online version as well.
I always find it surprising when I read aches due to Maven. Not that they don’t exist but when I first used Maven in 2003 it was a liberation from ant.
At the time for me Maven was a decent evolution from Make rather than the regression that ant was. I have since then be put back in ant hell and there is not a day do not wish to switch back to Maven.
Now to be sure there are a lot of things Maven is not good at. Being hacked is one of them.
I think the poor documentation and the necessity of adopting maven to existing ant projects turned people off. I like rake in the ruby world much better, but maven serves it’s purpose.
Even the authors of the Sonatype book admit the difficulty with maven’s documentation:
“Despite the best efforts of well-meaning volunteers, reading through plugin documentation on the Maven site is frustrating at best, and at worst, it’s a reason to abandon Maven.”
- pg 22 Maven the Definitive Guide