Moving from Ant to Maven

I've made the switch from Ant to Maven at work. Ant is an extremely flexible and powerful tool, but I find that most of the time it's TOO flexible when you are working in an environment where you are doing complex builds.

Thinking back over half a decade of Ant scripts, I realize that I always spend a lot of time when I join a new project trying to understand a whole set of different Ant scripts and then getting all of them to look and work in a consistent way across all the components I'm building. Maven uses a standardized build process with hooks at each step in the process for you to customize or add your own behavior. Think about all those standard things you do for a build. Compile some source code, run some unit tests, create a test report, then create a package (jar, ear, whatever). A simple Maven build gives you all that stuff right out of the box, even without having to write any scripts.

The Maven home page uses some intimidating language - what's all this about a "Project Object Model"? That's enough to scare off any prospective user. A POM is simply an XML file where you put the basic information about your builds - jar dependencies, file names, etc - all the same stuff you would have in an Ant build script. It's all declarative, so you don't have to worry about the order of things (sounds like Ant in the early days). Maven uses standard conventions for directory structures to keep things simple to configure (no more arguing with your coworkers about whether to put your source code in 'src' or 'source' or 'java'), and to keep things the same between different build scripts. Of course, you can override these configurations, but it's better to go with the standard just for consistency.

I think some people are in a pretty good comfort zone with Ant and are afraid of learning a new tool for builds. But overall, I think it's faster and easier to start from scratch with Maven. If you're the type of person who likes the use of "convention over configuration" in Rails, then Maven is for you.

And BTW, if you're working with Rails, rake and Capistrano are no-brainers.

Technorati Tags: ant, maven

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