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!

Apache Archiva goes live!

Archiva became a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation in March, and we’re now rounding out the move of some of the resources. The web site has moved to http://archiva.apache.org/, and the mailing lists have moved to the same domain.

The project continues to grow – we’ve just added our first committer as a standalone project (welcome, James!). Another release is also now just around the corner with much improved HTTP and WebDAV support, performance and memory improvements, and popular feature requests such as RSS and repository groups are just being rounded out.

Apache Archiva 1.0.2 Released

The Archiva team has just released Archiva 1.0.2. You can find out about it in the release notes – 41 fixes in all.

It’s a busy time coming up – Archiva is now a top level project at the ASF, and we are in the process of moving the infrastructure across. A pre-release of 1.1 will hot on the heels of this release, which includes several new features including some performance and memory improvements.

Have some ideas for how to improve repository management? Why not get involved today!

Being reminded of the benefits of a community in open source

To anyone that has worked in a healthy open source community, this will seem like a no-brainer, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the real benefits when you involve a community of diverse developers in what you’re doing.

Earlier in the week, Joakim brought up the discussion topic on the Archiva Development List about converting from Plexus to Spring. The original plan was comprehensive, but there were some worries about a "big bang" approach since most of our Plexus components were autowired. I wasn’t initially sure we even wanted to convert everything either.

So I spared a few hours to try an experiment, and we had a functional but ugly way to use both Plexus components from Spring, and vice-versa. I figured that would make do for a short term solution.

Then Nicolas ran with it and has come up with a much more transparent way to implement it. Once a few issues are ironed out, we have a solution that is release-quality at any time as we gradually make the migration, will require much less work hacking the test rigs, and we have Joakim’s comprehensive list (which he’s already started doing on trunk).

In a different environment, we could have very easily ended up with a massive refactoring that halted all the current development, or I could have had a half implemented change that rotted away locally. But together in less than a week (part time) the 3 of us and the others chiming in on the list, have a pretty complete solution and a plan of attack. We were able to maximise the available time of the contributors, and their particular interests (whereas I’d have run out of both much earlier otherwise).

It’s not revolutionary, or surprising – but it is cool – and if you can harness this kind of small innovation on a regular basis it makes a big difference.

Archiva is probably the most fun project I’m involved in right now because of the good people, the enthusiasm, and influx of new users and contributors since the recent releases. One of the main reasons we were looking at Spring was to lower the barrier to contributions – so if you’re using Archiva and have something you’d like to see done or fixed, why not come and join the party?