Shrink your POM!

There are many things, mostly implementation-related, that can be blamed on Maven, but I think most people agree on the fact that the POM concept (a declarative model of your project) is a good thing. Among other things, it allows to run a new plugin often with a minimum of configuration, or no configuration at all. For instance, a few days ago I was pointed to the Clirr plugin, a tool that allows to verify whether the API of a module has changed (and eventually breaking back-compatibility). If you have a working mavenized project, it's just the matter of running: mvn clirr:clirr (more about Clirr in a future post). The plugin learns everything it needs about the project from the POM and it's able to retrieve and analyze the artifacts of the previous version, so it can compare them with the current ones. With Ant my experience was that I needed to add a bit of an Ant script for every tool I wanted to integrate (e.g. Cobertura, FindBugs, PMD, CheckStyle) - for Cobertura, it wasn't the simplest patch of an Ant script ever. Unfortunately, POMs tend to grow. The past week some of my projects' master POMs were 1500+ lines - sure, they are verbose because of XML, but there is a bunch of real information within. In my experience, the largest sections are: The declaration of plugin versions in pluginManagement The declaration of dependency versions in dependencyManagement The configuration of all plugins...

Date: February, 21 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/02/21/shrink-your-pom

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