What would you suggest as a replacement to the Maven Java build toolset? Just plain Ant scripts? SCons?
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What would you suggest as a replacement to the Maven Java build toolset? Just plain Ant scripts? SCons?
While I like the idea of Maven, I always find myself fighting it for anything but the simplest configurations. Its architecture is plugin-based, and the quality of the plugins varies widely. Documentation is sketchy at best; half the time I can’t figure out if the doc I’m reading is for Maven 1 or 2. And how often have you had to resort to using the
maven-ant-pluginto do something basic?I’ve been using Apache Ivy for about a year now, and I’m pretty happy with it. There is a bit of a learning curve though. But there’s an active mailing list, and the author is very responsive.
What I ended up doing was writing a ‘library’ of a few simple Ant targets such as ‘resolve’, ‘compile’, ‘install’, etc. that expect things to be in standard Maven places (such as
src/main/java) and then<import>the targets into my various projects. This way you get the best of both worlds- Maven-style configuration, and all the power of Ant.