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Can’t wait using the latest maven goodies named mvnsh, but no binary are easely available See comments…

Getting and compiling the latest maven shell can be frustrating the tool depends on a lots of snapshots libs which you’ll not find in a central repo yet.

So I wrote a mvnsh-settings.xml containing the following :

<settings>
    <profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>defaultProfile</id>
            <activation>
                <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            </activation>
            <repositories>
                <repository>
                    <id>sonatype</id>
                    <url>http://repository.sonatype.org/content/groups/forge/</url>
                    <snapshots>
                        <enabled>true</enabled>
                        <updatePolicy>always</updatePolicy>
                        <checksumPolicy>fail</checksumPolicy>
                    </snapshots>
                    <releases>
                        <enabled>true</enabled>
                        <checksumPolicy>fail</checksumPolicy>
                    </releases>
                </repository>
            </repositories>
        </profile>
    </profiles>
</settings>

Adapt the instruction found on mvnsh github page to use an alternate settings.xml using the -s switch :

git clone git://github.com/sonatype/mvnsh.git
cd mvnsh
mvn install -s mvnsh-settings.xml

And you can benefit from the colors, growl notifications etc…

There is a good article up on TheServerSide named “Setting up a maven repository“, this is the kind of article I wish I have the time to write.

It sum up quite clearly the necessity of having some kind of proxy in front of your internal maven repository. At my current company we where using a alpha version of Maven Repository Manager, former name is archiva, which I depicted a few months ago. But we where more or less forced to abandon using it, due to our incapacity to understand how it worked (read the software cost us too much time to maintain that it brought)

I did have lot of doubt of using Artifactory (the maven proxy detailed in the article) since it stores the files in a database. I just don’t understand this, apart maybe for the transactional behavior that it may brings. After reading it, and suffered once again of the network latency of ibiblio I will consider again artifactory.

This article is must read if you haven’t already this kind of software and you’re using maven.

Thanks to Gwena?�l for the article link.

Link:

• Setting up a maven repository
• Artifactory The repository proxy described in the article.

Maven 2.0.7 is out, this is the third releases in approx. 4 months. See releases notes. Nothing outrageously new but It’s great to see maven releases coming steadily.

Sonatype, a new company around Maven has just been announced (also here).

Having two companies supporting Maven, each having on board major project committers can’t be bad from an OSS point of view.

Let’s hope they come quickly with solid products, I’m pretty sure there is good money to be made out of maven related commercial tools.

Apache Maven is great for building java application, it is especially good at dealing at project dependencies and the way they are used and packaged with a project. In the world of the Java applications there is also the guys who play it differently. OSGI based applications don’t deal with dependencies like any other “classical” java projects. For instance when you have a dependency in OSGI you can’t access all the classes of this dependency but only those for which the package has been exposed… This difference between classical and osgi app make difficult building an Eclipse RCP application 100% with maven. More exactly it was so easy to build it with their specific generated ant script, that it was rarely worth it.

This lengthy article at Eclipse Corner, is describing in great details how to build/test an Eclipse plugin with maven. It covers in depth how maven2 works, how eclipse works and what to do to make them work together effectively.

I’ve yet to try their solution which is almost solely based on custom plugins they have written to perform this specific task. I know that the maven team is also working towards supporting OSGI’s way of handling dependencies out of the box. There is also a plugin at codehaus which handles building Eclipse application from maven 2.

Links :

• Building Eclipse Plugins with Maven 2, Eclipse Corner Article
• Codehaus Eclipse PDE plugin

Almost 1 year after the previous release ( 2.0.4 was out in april 2006), Maven 2.0.5 is out today bringing a little bit more than 80 bug fixes/enhancements.

I’ve tested the latest rc and all the various builds I’m running are working fine, but some changes included in this release could affect your build and are worth noticing in the release notes.

Links :

• Bug fixed in the release
• Download

The Java Module System (JSR-277) aims to describe what will be the future of the actual jar file format and where and how to store them. They try to define a new way of describing a piece of code in java (jar, ear, war etc..) and how to store and retrieve them, so almost every developer is going to be impacted by their work. I’ve always been keen of following this JSR in particular, since it has probably a lot in common with what OSGi is going to be and on the other side it’s directly impacting what maven is defining.

InfoQ has recently displayed a presentation describing this JSR in details, the talk is animated by the specification leader.

I finally took some time last night to watch it (ok it’s 50 minutes long, but if you can watch only the first 5 minutes you’ll understand roughly what they are preparing), it’s well worth it considering you’ll probably be impacted sooner or later to what those guys are defining now.

Links :

• InfoQ Article
• Presentation
• JSR-277 homepage

The javancss-maven-plugin for maven 2 has been released today.

This plugin allows user to:

• Compute complexity (CCN) and quantity (NCSS) metrics on your code
• Create a report displaying those number.
• fails the build when the complexity or quantity metrics goes beyond a threshold.

The plugin is based on the javancss tool available already as a standalone tool and a ant task (but who’s using ant nowadays ).

This version is almost final, since there is no plan to add huge features, unless you request it…
The plugin is sync at codehaus repository and ibiblio at least for now.
To use it in your maven build you have only to add :

<project>
  ...
  <reporting>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>javancss-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0-beta-2</version>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </reporting>
  ...
</project>

Full documentation is available at mojo web site.
Bug reports and the like can be reported in codehaus Jira.

There’ve been quite a few bug fixes since last release back in june 06.
Here’s the release notes :
Bug

• [MJNCSS-7] – Profanity in generated report
• [MJNCSS-8] – NullPointerException when report are generated on … Windows
• [MJNCSS-10] – Plugin crashes when Java elements have special characters

Improvement

• [MJNCSS-2] – javancss-maven-plugin JXR integration
• [MJNCSS-3] – exclude directory
• [MJNCSS-4] – JavaNCSS may not fully support 1.5 annotations
• [MJNCSS-5] – Drop Function and replace by Method where applicable in reports
• [MJNCSS-6] – Make plugin documenation standard with docck.

New Feature

• [MJNCSS-1] – Create javancss:check mojo