Book Released – Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation

After being available in “RAW” (draft) form for the last few months, the final release of Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation is now available online! It is available in both eBook and printed + eBook versions.

We had some specific goals in writing this that I think we’ve achieved:

• It is intended to build on top of knowledge from the free books that have gone before it with minimal duplication – though still enough information to stand alone.
• The book should be of most value to intermediate Maven users, but also useful to beginners. Everyone should learn something from it. It should update Maven 2.0 users on the latest available technology such as Maven 2.2, the newer Archetype creation from a project mechanism, and under-utilised plugins like the Enforcer or Shade plugins.
• We wanted to focus on “best practices” and tying everything together in a way that shows how Maven was meant to be used. Hopefully readers will experience the occasional “aha!” moment.
• The book works through the issues by a gradual example application, like building up (or applying Maven to) your own project. It intends to show how a reasonably complete project structure is best worked with, and the example application should be relatively interesting in its own right. It gets built from scratch, up to an assembly, building it in CI, deploying it to the repository, and releasing it.
• We wanted to give some coverage to Archiva and Continuum (projects that we’ve both been involved in for some time) to illustrate team concepts, but also convey the concepts in a way that translates to other equivalent tools.

You can see what was covered in the Table of Contents.

The book eventually weighed in at 450 pages – far more than we’d intended when we set out, though still with plenty of potential topics to cover. When we started this just over a year ago, my thoughts had initially been around simply covering the content from my series of Maven presentations and training content in book form, but soon found we could expand on many of the topics.

I had the good fortune to work with Deng Ching on the book (her announcement is on her blog), who poured a number of weekends and evenings into writing half of the content and reading (and re-reading) my writing.

We had some great help from our reviewers – Carsten Ziegler, Wendy Smoak and Emmanuel Venisse, as well as the encouragement of several others who wanted to help but couldn’t commit the time. Thank you all!

Maven 2.2 Released, Versions Clarified

After a short hiccup with the distribution location, Maven 2.2.0 has been released and is appearing on most mirrors. John has blogged some details of the changes you can expect in the release. I’ve been using it (and the prior release candidates) daily without any issues, and it does provide some useful changes that make the upgrade worthwhile.

Though it was not a major release in terms of feature changes and fixes, it has helped in re-balancing the available Maven releases in a way that will hopefully be simpler to move forward with and easier to understand.

Maven has suffered for some time with confusion over the “2.1″ version number – some projects still depend on pre-release code from early development on it that ended up not reflecting the 2.1.0 release at all. So along with good reasons to bump the minor version because of build-affecting changes and a firm requirement on Java 5 to run Maven, moving past the confusing version (which is also quite similar to 2.0.10, the other current release) is helpful.

As John has pointed out, 2.2.x is expected to be our stable branch going forward for the near future. We have been extremely paranoid about backwards compatibility between versions for some time, and now feel that we’ve reached a point where development can end on 2.0.x (either at the current 2.0.10 release or with a wrap-up 2.0.11 release that is under discussion).

So that leaves the active tracks as:

• Maven 2.2.x – selective bugfixes on the stable release
• Maven 2.3 – if new features for Maven 2 start being implemented, they will land here in the short term. No roadmap has been defined yet, but there are some open issues in JIRA that could be a starting point
• Maven 3 – a backwards-compatible refactoring of the entire codebase – currently early alpha, developer only, to be released When It’s Done

All users should be able to upgrade to 2.2.0 from 2.0.x, with the small caveats that are documented in the 2.1.0 and 2.2.0 release notes (and if not, be sure to let us know!). So, if you are using Maven 2.0.x, give Maven 2.2.0 a spin!

Selenium Maven Plugin 1.0 Released

The Selenium Maven plugin 1.0 has now been released, taking advantage of the recent Selenium 1.0.1 release. This will be useful to those using Firefox 3 for example which required a workaround in the previous version.

This is the first stable release version of the plugin. Full credit goes to Jason Dillon for his work on the plugin to get it to this point!

I will be following up with some posts on some tips for its use in the coming days.

In the mean time, here are the release notes since 1.0-rc-1:

Bug

• [MSELENIUM-20] – Starting the selenese goal using selenium-maven-plugin
• [MSELENIUM-39] – firefoxProfileTemplate parameter does not work
• [MSELENIUM-43] – Invalid constructor used by selenese goal to construct SeleniumServer
• [MSELENIUM-49] – Invalid dependency version for ‘org.openqa.selenium.client-drivers’ in site example

Improvement

• [MSELENIUM-30] – Add displayPropertiesFile support for selenium:selenese goal
• [MSELENIUM-40] – Using a remote selenium server with Selenese.
• [MSELENIUM-50] – Upgrade to Selenium 1.0

New Feature

• [MSELENIUM-38] – Start Selenium Server with a Proxy via System Properties

Apache Maven 2.1.0-M1 Released

Apache Maven 2.1, milestone 1 has been released.

From John’s announcement:

This release signals the beginning of a new direction in the development of Maven. Recently, Maven’s development efforts were split into three major goals. First, the Maven 2.0.x code line will be minimally maintained for regression fixes; the 2.0.x series should be entering end-of-life mode soon now that 2.1.0-M1 is out.

Previously developed as 2.0.10, we decided to move to the new version for two reasons. Firstly, to mark the significance of some of the internal changes being made – you should notice that this version is faster and less memory hungry than its predecessors. But even more importantly, this opens up a an active branch of development for new features that can be released in the short term. The following are tentatively planned for 2.1.0 final (with implementations already in testing):

• Addition of a prepare-package phase
• Make-Like Reactor Mode (also coming in plugin form for Maven 2.0.x)
• Parallel Artifact Resolution
• PGP Artifact Verification
• Automatic Parent Versioning

The release contains 70 other fixes and is likely to be as stable as any Maven 2.0.x release, so it is worth checking out. For the more cautious, 26 of those fixes are planned to be released as 2.0.10 in the not too distant future.

The milestone can be downloaded from the Maven download page (just below the 2.0.9 release).

Apache Archiva 1.1 Released

Good news from the Archiva project – a new version is out this week with a number of new features and improvements.

There are about 89 fixes and improvements, particularly including:

• Artifact Uploads from the Web Interface
• RSS
• Virtual Repositories
• Timeouts for remote proxies
• New Runtime Bundle based on Jetty 6.1 and Java Service Wrapper
• Apache Jackrabbit WebDAV Servlet
• Architecture changed to Spring

You can see more in the full release notes or download it from the site.

It’s a drop-in upgrade, so try it out!