Mailing-List: contact dev-help@cocoon.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
From: "Carsten Ziegeler" <cziegeler@s-und-n.de>
To: <dev@cocoon.apache.org>
Subject: RE: [VOTE] - Move Cocoon to Maven
Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 09:12:39 +0200
Organization: S&N AG
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <40B37A05.5020800@apache.org>
Thread-Index: AcRCd6DT8FJVaM04RhCx4MM2PdDF1wAdzHJA
Message-ID: <OFA1E70B89.4425F4FB-ONC1256EA0.0026DAB8@sundn.de>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="us-ascii"

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> 
> Carsten Ziegeler wrote:
> 
> > Although the vote is over, just my 2 cents:
> > 
> > Maven is a really useful tool *if* you know how to use it! I think 
> > most projects that tried to use Maven and failed did not 
> use it in the 
> > right way. Just look at the mess Avalon tried to do with Maven.
> > If you want to use Maven, you have to use it the way Maven 
> tells you 
> > to do it. If you don't like this way, don't use Maven at all.
> > 
> > But if you choose to go this road, you will benefit from 
> it. We moved 
> > several projects from Ant to Maven and have a lot of 
> advantages now. 
> > (There are some disadvantages of course, like only one source 
> > directory etc.)
> > 
> > Anyways, using Maven for Cocoon *now* is near to impossible or we 
> > would loose all benefits Maven would provide us. If we 
> would have each 
> > block as a standalone sub project (aka real blocks) then we could 
> > benefit from Maven.
> 
> Can you elaborate more on this? what would that give us?
> 
In my opinion Maven has three advantages:

1. No need to write/maintain a build script anymore - everything "just
works".
Now I know that this might be a very optimistic view of Maven and many
disagree. We switched several projects from Ant to Maven. Now we can
use Maven out of the box, don't need to adjust the build script just
to add new functionality. For example adding JUnit tests is just describing
"here is my source directory containing the tests" and that's it.
A good example is the Pluto project: first we had a very ugly ant script
(80KB),
that noone could really maintain and even worse it worked best on windows
and
didn't work on other OS. Now we simply use Maven and it works.

2. You describe the whole project: developers, mailing lists, repository
etc.
Everything about your project is at one central place.

3. The biggest advantage imho (and again this is my personal opinion -
others
might differ of course) are the different reports you get for free: code
style checkings, metrics, test reports - you name it. When we switched one
particalur porject we got for the first time metrics about our project
and saw some potential problems in our code that we could then fix. Without
Maven noone cared about such things - with Maven you start using them.
And everything can be shown on your website (even deploying the website can
be done by Maven).

So summarizing: you start to use things that you haven't used before
(perhaps
because of being lazy) and in the end your project/code can benefit from
these
new things.

Carsten