Last week Apache released ODE 1.0. ODE is an open source BPEL engine, which supports BPEL 2.0. While browsing the ODE website I noticed that one item on the roadmap mentions migration from maven2 to buildr. I haven’t worked with Maven yet, we are still using Ant on our projects, mostly because it’s a better fit for JDeveloper. Maven has a different folder structure than JDeveloper for projects, which means you have to do some work to make it fit. JDeveloper has support for Ant out of the box, so it’s less effort to use it. But I always thought that at some point we would migrate to Maven.
But recently I’ve noticed projects moving away from Maven. Some people complain that it’s too hard to do non standard stuff. It supposedly it’s also pretty hard to debug when your build isn’t working: Introducing buildr or how we cured our maven blues.
I think maven has three strong benefits: 1) standardization (directory structure, naming, etc), 2) out of the box functionality (documentation generation, etc), and 3) dependency management. But we’ve got all those issues solved in Ant, so there really is no real need to migrate to Maven. Using Ant’s import and macro tasks, I’ve created some default Ant functionality which provides out of the box functionality for new projects, and handles the standardization. Dependency management can be handled using Apache Ivy. So I think I’ll stick with Ant for now, and see how maven and buildr will develop. No need to rush into a new build tool.
June 7th, 2007 at 02:22:24
Worth mentioning here that there is a Maven plug-in that creates a JDeveloper project based on your maven directories:
http://people.apache.org/repo/m2-snapshot-repository/org/apache/myfaces/trinidadbuild/maven-jdev-plugin/1.2-07-may-SNAPSHOT/
June 7th, 2007 at 12:44:58
>>No need to rush into a new build tool.
Same here. ANT+Ivy is a solid combo for us too. (See: http://www.cumquat.nl/cumquant_1.html – sorry only in Dutch).
June 8th, 2007 at 08:33:56
I though i read somewhere that the maven jdeveloper plugin was not really production ready.
June 8th, 2007 at 15:43:38
I would still recommend having a closer look at Buildr. Even if you don’t end up using it, I think the approach is interesting. Just for you to get a better idea of what’s “out there”