All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

First experience with Maven: sour

jdavidb on 2008-01-18T16:11:36

Don't just dump a pom.xml file in the top directory with no other documentation than a LICENSE.txt. You're lucky I even know that pom.xml refers to Maven at all, and it's only by a miracle that I know I need to type "mvn" rather than "maven" to run maven.

I'm somewhat reasonably intelligent so I assumed I was going to type the mvn command followed by some optional build targets, so I did some reasonable things to find documentation of those build targets. There was no documentation in the downloaded package, nor does documentation appear to exist on the website. Thus far, this is the developer's fault.

So, I just ran a straight mvn. I got an error that I need to specify a build target (a "goal" in maven parlance), with a suggestion that I try "install," which is scary. That's it.

Apparently if I want to know what build targets are available, I'm going to have to look at pom.xml myself. The whole point of XML is to make files which are easy for software to read. So mvn ought to do this for me. I don't know how to read pom.xml; I've never read it in my life, and to be honest I need to spend my time learning ant's xml format for my job, thank you very much. And when I do discern what build targets are available, odds are I'll have no pointers as to which are standard, which are rare options, which are old unsupported junk, etc.

Take advantage of XML and tell me what's in it.

Java Sucks

djberg96 on 2008-01-18T18:02:38

You mean a big, bloated tool written in a big, bloated language for big, bloated projects by less than average developers who can't write a line of code without their precious intellisense isn't any good?

Shocking.

Re:Java Sucks

lachoy on 2008-01-19T02:35:34

Geez, it's a wonder anyone gets anything done with that language, much less makes any money.

Yup

Dom2 on 2008-01-18T20:08:44

Your experience mirrors my own.

In other “maven sucks” news, I tried to help out somebody in my office on a Maven project today. I discovered that web development has turned into:

  • Change a line in a file in Eclipse
  • Run Maven to build a package and install it to the local repository (~/.m2).
  • Run Maven to build a war file and run "jetty":http://www.mortbay.org/ with it.

This whole process takes around 3 minutes. There's nothing like “edit page / hit refresh”. It's taking productivity to a new low.

Now don't get me wrong. Having done a bit of Java work, I've got a lot more respect for it than when I started. But there's a lot of stupidity out there in the Java world, and Maven is a big part of it.

Re:Yup

sigzero on 2008-01-18T20:28:06

I had been looking at it and I am starting to see a lot of areas Maven can suck you into a big black hole. I think I will put the book down now.