This is (likely) my last post to this blog. I've spent the past 2 and a 1/2 years using Maven primarily in my Java projects and my companies. Part of this I think is just growing up. When I first started using Maven I had just started work at a company who's development team consisted of some novice Java users. It of course did not help then that a lot of the software they had was written in Java. Queue some of the ugliest Ant build files I have ever seen. These people obviously had never been exposed to C/C++ and make in an academic environment... as they would have been heckled for such lack of simplicity. These Ant build scripts just wouldn't fly for me. So I found Maven. I used it to simplify the build environment, for my co-workers and myself. I encountered problems while using Maven which I solved. I watched the community slowly build up. I started a blog and shared my knowledge. It was fun.
I've progressed A LOT in the past two years. I am no longer a guy who is fresh out of college, smart but unprepared for nastiness which the enterprises of the world contain. I've honed my technique, worked on numerous projects (many more than the majority of people out of college for only a few years), and I have made honest appraisals of the things I have done. I'm at a point now where the expressivity of a tool such as Ant makes it much more viable than something like Maven. If Maven was Java, then Ant would be Python. I can do the same two things in both, but one is much easier to use (Python, duh).
Other things that have pulled me away from Maven, and more specifically Maven's ideology, are tools such as Gant (Groovy language + Ant) and scripts in Pylons (Python web framework). Being able to use the full power of a language right there in a build file, is a beautiful and powerful thing. I also would argue this is daunting for the novice. I have come full circle from Ant to Maven and back to Ant. I'm now ready to work on projects where the full responsibility is mine in making sure the build files are clean, coherent and useful. I recognize now that this is not a lot of responsibility, that the fact my previous co-workers could not handle it speaks volumes for the type of organization they were running.
Please drop a line if you have any questions about articles I've written here. You can reach me at mentalstasis. at. hotmail. com. I'm always interested in some convo with other computer professionals out there so don't hesitate. Thanks to all you readers out there, and best of luck.
-Rob O.
