Apache Archiva 1.3 release and what’s next

In the midst of a busy couple of weeks, I neglected to post about the Archiva 1.3 release that was announced recently (and on that topic, Continuum has posted a new beta release as well).

The Archiva release focused mostly on bugfixes (particularly for indexing and LDAP), but we decided it was worthy of a version bump after the addition of an upload audit logging feature and some decent performance improvements. It’s an easy upgrade for 1.2 users – if you keep your configuration separate, then just unzip the new version and start it up using the same environment variables as you would the previous version.

Archiva is also easy to try out if you already have a Maven repository – its primary storage is the filesystem in a Maven repository format, so you can point it at a copy and everything will be available straight away (gradually indexing resources for access through the UI in the background).

As for what’s next – while it’s still to be put to vote, I hope that the next version will be based on the work I started again last year and have had in mind since almost the beginning of the project. This focuses on two underlying aspects: the removal of the archiva database requirement and the transformation to be an extensible metadata repository.

I always refer to the database removal as “Back to the Future”, since it is similar to the design pre-1.0 where Lucene was used to store all of the information, however in this case I had the opportunity to learn from our experiences and build on a more appropriate foundation:

• A central, extensible metadata model that allows storage of any different repository , artifact, or resource type;
• Delegating repository requests, to better facilitate repository grouping and proxying when configured, and to allow metadata to be regenerated from the storage on the fly;
• Decomposing functionality into plugins so that optional portions can be removed. Plugins operate on metadata, certain repository events and a few other extension points. This remains a work in progress, but the aim is to allow reducing the deployable application to as little as a simple maven proxy cache for your local machine with a very low footprint, and to make it easy and robust to write and use a combination of different plugins.

At the moment, these changes are all under the hood – apart from configuration there is no visible difference other than the number of bugs that got removed along the way! However, the decoupling will make way for easier development of new features and the opportunity for much needed advances in the UI.

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 Continuum Settles in to its New Home

Last month, the Apache board approved a resolution to establish the Apache Continuum project. So after just short of 3 years as part of the Apache Maven project, Continuum has grown to the size of being a project in its own right, and moved out to it’s new home at http://continuum.apache.org/. There are 13 committers on the initial roster, and the new chair of the project is Emmanuel Venisse.

While Continuum will still be an easy-to-use, enterprise-ready build server for Maven projects, it will also be looking to add new features in the near future.

Discussion has been active lately about the direction of the project in upcoming releases, and a roadmap formed for "2.0", with the intention of incremental releases towards that path. Some of the focus will be around using more well-known technologies as the underpinnings for the system so that it will be easier for new contributors get involved.

Congratulations to the Continuum team, and I look forward to the future!

Interview with Emmanuel Venisse of Apache Maven and Continuum

I recently decided to catch up with Emmanuel and conduct an interview with him about his involvement in Maven since the early days, and his work at DevZuz.

I’ve had the pleasure of not only working with Emmanuel, but meeting him a few times face to face, including in his home town near Paris, France. Yes – I do consider it a privilege to actually meet the people I work with face to face!

It was great to talk to Emmanuel about all the things he has done for Maven and the things that still excite him.

The interview has been posted on the new devzuz.org site, which we launched today. If you are looking for information on Maestro, the Apache Maven community, Q for Eclipse or Eclipse Kepler you might like to check it out regularly.

Announcing DevZuz

I’m back from a holiday and am at ApacheCon, and obviously starting to get a few questions about what’s going on with Mergere.

After some months of planning, this week the new brand for our company was announced. DevZuz is the evolution of Simula Labs, including Mergere which is now a subsidiary.

Other than “What does DevZuz mean?”, the main question I am getting is “Why change the name?”

The reality of the two companies today is that they have a single, simple and clear goal: to help enterprises adopt open source projects and development processes. Unifying under a single brand gives us the opportunity for a “fresh start” that reflects that specific focus. Far from being the end of Mergere, we are continuing to do what we are doing well now, but additionally making some very positive changes (particularly in relation to our community involvement).

As DevZuz, we will expand on our development and support for Maestro, which is an enterprise-ready distribution of Maven technologies now coming up on its one-year anniversary. Maestro, which remains a free download, provides the foundation that is used behind the firewall to enable artifact-based development practices (and consume open source technologies). We will continue to provide support, training and consulting services for Maestro customers.

In addition, DevZuz can now provide hosted services that build on top of Maestro to help enterprises manage their open source governance and support.

We are also expanding our network of partners to provide additional services, and to continue to provide commercial support for key open source technologies.

More information can be found at our brand new web site. There you’ll also find that we have released Maestro 1.2.

One of the exciting developments is a re-emphasis on our contribution to the open source communities we participate in. Mergere has made significant contributions to open source over the last two years in terms of development resources, free services and the contribution of the first free book about Maven 2. These will, of course, continue – but as DevZuz, we have established specific roles and practices to improve our community involvement. Our aim is for our participation in those communities to be completely transparent.

Though DevZuz is not “the Maven company”, DevZuz is committed to making Maven and its subprojects successful as a community in it’s own right. In particular, we will be focusing on helping produce more frequent releases in the community, in addition to the tested Maestro product suite. You can expect a lot more to come in this area – and this is exciting news for Maven users and developers alike.

In addition to our continued participation in Maven, DevZuz is leading the Eclipse Kepler project proposal as a community effort.

I’m personally pleased with this direction – we have interesting and different problems to solve while continuing to focus on open source development.

I’m at ApacheCon in Amsterdam this week, and JavaOne next week. If you’re there, drop me a line and ask me a random Maven question (everyone else is!)