The title of the session was, "Getting Serious About Build Automation: Using Maven in the Real World". Based on his recent JavaOne presentation of the same name (slides available for download).
Before attending the talk I was probably a lot like most of the readers of this blog (both of you? :-) ) in that I had used Maven to get some jars/artifacts into projects that I have worked on, set up some internal project dependencies, groaned aloud in frustration at the maintainers of other external projects for not having their config in place as part of their upgrade process..., but haven't really taken the time to see where to go from there.
Here is a brief summary of some aspects of Maven that I will be looking into further because of the talk:
- the m2eclipse plugin for Eclipse, including its visualization of dependency conflicts (I've seen these conflicts in a project I worked on, but didn't know quite what they meant or how to resolve them by exclusions or specific declarations)
- the ability to standardize project settings using inheritance, including the option to specify versions of artifacts in such a way that they will only be applied to child projects if the child project goes to introduce the dependency (
- using multiple modules to reduce the build time
- the Nexus Maven Repository Manager - refered to as an enterprise repository for caching external dependencies and holding copies of locally built artifacts
- the use of patches to manipulate differences in artifacts being built for different platforms, rather than having to introduce runtime configuration through external dependencies
I find John's blog is a good source of up-to-date info about tools that Java developers should be using to make their lives easier, and their projects progress more smoothly.
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