Maven is good, but needs some love

You know that I've moved to Maven more than one year ago and I don't regret. I think I would be unable to manage the number of projects I'm managing on my own without it (or at least without an effective artifact repository). But Maven needs a proper and clean environment. Maven experts are constantly advising about that. One of the most important pieces of the environment is the artifact repository. You can create a cheap one with a plain webdav resource, or you can install a specific tool such as Nexus or Artifactory. A plain webdav resource is simpler to manage and might sound as a good solution for simpler cases, while a specific tool is more powerful but more complex to setup and administer. It's your choice: the important thing is that everything is under your control and properly managed. Hear what's happening to me since a couple of days. Before going on, I'll recap a couple of Maven concepts. When you have a multi-repository project (unfortunately it frequently happens, as some libraries you might depend have their own repo), Maven searches for artifacts in all of them - what typically happens is that the first repo responds with an HTTP 404 - Not Found and Maven searches on until it finds what it needs. Then it stores a metadata XML file to recall where it has last found the artifact. In this way it can avoid constantly polling for things and it's faster. Now, I have still a few rem...

Date: July, 27 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/07/27/maven-good-needs-some-love

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