Free Maven Meetup at ApacheCon US

A few Maven committers are going to be at ApacheCon US in Oakland next week, and we’ve organised for a free user and developer meetup as part of the conference schedule. It’ll be held on Tuesday, November 3, at 8pm.

Brian has posted a short signup page, so if you’re planning to come along, please add your name there. You might also want to talk about a particular subject for 15 minutes and add it to the proposed agenda.

There’s still time to sign up for my Maven training course on Monday, November 2 as well, which you can do from the main conference registration page.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Better Builds with Maven now available to read online

Better Builds with Maven has been available for a few years now, initially to those who registered on the web site and then available as a freely downloadable PDF. However, now it is finally available to read online as HTML, bookmark, etc. (in addition to the PDF download). It has also been relicensed under a Creative Commons license.

While the book is now somewhat dated and there are newer alternatives available, the information is still relevant. It has had minor updates as it moved homes several times over the last few years.

I hope you find this useful!

Maven training in Oakland, November 2

As I’ve blogged previously, I’m gearing up again to present my training session Apache Maven: End-to-end at ApacheCon US in Oakland in just a few weeks now. There are still spots available, so go ahead and register from the ApacheCon US site. Noirin offers some tips on how to justify ApacheCon to your boss.

The training session is hands on – all of the software and material is distributed on CDs and we spend some time digging into Maven and development infrastructure in a variety of ways.

Apart from the standard training material, there is the opportunity to work through some specific questions for your environment if it is something that interests the whole group, and of course those discussions can be continued over the rest of the time at the conference.

Hope to see you there!

Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation Sample Chapter

When I announced the release of the book last week, I neglected to mention that there is a sample chapter online. It is available from the book’s site, but can be directly downloaded as a PDF:

• Chapter 6 – Useful Maven Plugins

There is also an excerpt online if you don’t like PDF.

While it does stand alone, the examples are also worked in to the context of the sample project used throughout the book where appropriate.

This chapter was a late inclusion, but turned out to be one of my favourites. While it doesn’t cover all the useful Maven plugins (many such as the Enforcer and Assembly plugins are picked up elsewhere in the book), it highlights some that aren’t always well known or used:

• The Remote Resources plugin – and particularly the right pattern for including a package of reusable resources
• The Build Number plugin
• The Shade plugin – a very useful way to handle redistributing JARs and “uberJARs” and reducing dependency and classloading issues
• The Build Helper plugin – useful bits and pieces like additional artifacts to deploy and reserved network ports for tests
• The AntRun plugin (and other scripting languages) – how to still use Ant without the guilt of violating The Maven Way!
• The Exec plugin – fork an external process in your build, or configure it for running your standalone application easily from the POM

I do think if there was one plugin I would have liked to cover more in this centralised location it would have been the Enforcer – perhaps pulling some entries together would make a good blog topic in the future though.

I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider buying the book!

Interview with Feathercast about Maven Training

Last week, Rich Bowen from Feathercast interviewed me about the training I’ll be hosting in Oakland on November 2: FeatherCast » Blog Archive » Episode 63: Brett Porter – Maven. More information about the training session can be found on the conference web site or in my previous post.