Moving Away from Maven

I've gotten some comments asking why I'm moving away from Maven.

I started to use Maven initially as part of the HiveMind experiment. Fundamentally, I liked two specific features:

• Automated donwload of dependencies (from http://www.ibiblio.org/maven)
• Integrated pretty documentation (with navigation)

Maven does those two things pretty well, though the documentation part has a large number of bugs that makes keeping the documentation up-to-date problematic.

Anyway, measured by my Four Principals, Maven falls shorts:

• Simplicity - this isn't even on the horizon in Maven-land. If you deviate even a tiny bit from Maven's one-true-path, you are lost! The complexity of plugins, class-loaders, XML documents that are Jelly programs in disguise, lack of documentation, etc., etc. means that doing something trivial can take hours of guesswork. Some parts of this "release candidate" have obviously not even been given a cursory test. Certainly the internals of most plugins are a maze of Ant, Jelly, properties and such, seemingly without end.

  This could be somewhat addressed by documentation, but there is a pitiful amount and what there is, is out of date. Understanding multi-project (the whole point of Maven you would think) is a total challenge, addressed only by endless experimentation.

• Consistency - I guess this is hard to guage; do you write your own plugin? Write ad-hoc Jelly script? Write and use an Ant task?
• Efficiency - Maven is sluggish, chews memory, tends to repeat operations needlessly. I could comment on the volume of downloads that occur (for plugins, for libraries the plugins depend on) but that actually isn't an issue, after you run Maven the first time. However, for HiveMind, I've taken to leaving the room while I perform my dist build ... and it's only two small projects.

  One concrete example: when using Maven, I could only get my unit tests to work by turning fork on. With Ant, I'm able to run the unit tests without forking. That's a huge difference.

• Feedback - Can you say "NullPointerException"?

What I've accomplished in two days using Ant 1.6 will serve me well for HiveMind and for Tapestry ... and beyond. I think we'll be able to get a significant amount of Maven's functionality in a small, finite, understandable package, and be able to use it on the vast majority of pure Java projects.

For example, Here's the build.xml for the framework:

<project name="HiveMind Framework" default="jar">

	<property name="jar.name" value="hivemind"/>
	<property name="javadoc.package" value="org.apache.hivemind.*"/>

	<property name="root.dir" value=".."/>
	<import file="${root.dir}/common/jar-module.xml"/>
	<import file="${common.dir}/javacc.xml"/>								
					
	<target name="compile">
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="commons-logging-1.0.3.jar" group-id="commons-logging"/>
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="javassist-2.6.jar" group-id="jboss"/>
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="werkz-1.0-beta-10.jar" group-id="werkz"/>
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="servletapi-2.3.jar" group-id="servletapi"/>				
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="oro-2.0.6.jar" group-id="oro"/>
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="log4j-1.2.7.jar" group-id="log4j"/>
				
		<ibiblio-dependency jar="easymock-1.1.jar" group-id="easymock" use="test"/>
			
		<run-javacc input="${javacc.src.dir}/SimpleDataLanguage.jj" package-path="org/apache/hivemind/sdl/parser"/>
		
		<default-compile/>
	</target>

</project>

And here's the the project.xml, project.properties, and maven.xml.

I hate to bash the Maven project ... but what I see in Maven is a good, simple, core idea that's spiralled down the wrong path by trying to be everything to everyone. That's a lesson I'm taking to heart as I build something that suits my needs better.