Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Why drop Maven?

Recently I've noticed projects dropping Maven in favour of some other build tool... Apache Qpid comes to mind in this case. I'm wondering, is there a real good technical reason that folks do not like Maven? It has its quirks... but really, what tool doesn't? I've been using it for years now and like it better that any other build tool out there.

2 comments:

Jason Kilgrow said...

Hmmm....I use maven and it works great for my needs. Especially since we are a netbeans shop and the integration is first rate.

I've only use make, ant, and maven for my build tool. Ant is good but I think it forces you to focus too much on the nuts and bolts. Maven is pretty slick and seems to be an industry standard.

I don't know...either a tool meets your requirements or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then it's time to switch. We knew it was time for a change when managing an ant project was just too onerous. Maybe these people moving away from maven have found maven's structure too limiting.

Jonathan Anstey said...

I think those are good points. Ant doesn't enforce any structure, which some people may like. But IMO that freedom can lead to a build system so customized that only the original writers have any hope of understanding it...

Maybe some folks are just unaware of how to extend Maven properly for edge cases. For these edge cases I've typically just used Ant (surprise!) within Maven - either by using the maven-antrun-plugin or by writing a custom mojo.