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Jason Van Zyl, creator of Maven and founder of Mergere was invited to the latest OSSGTP meeting in Paris, and I was lucky enough to be available at this date.

He made 3 presentations, which were also presented on july 11th at the Maven day (which I couldn’t attend), the presentations were :

1 - Maven Repository Manager (MRM)

This tool is basically a web interface on top of a Maven repository. You can quickly search for a specific jar, whitout having to remember the whole directory structure (I’ve heard this questions a lot recently).
You can also compare jars you have in an application without having his version number through a md5 (or sha1) search. This works by computing the md5 key of the jar you’re looking a version for and comparing it with an index maintained by MRM of all md5 of all artifacts in the repository. This is definetly usefull whenever you stumble on a project full of jar without version number.
It also acts as a proxy, thus helping not to have tons of repositories in our configuration, and also not to suffer too much when ibiblio.org or whatever repository mirror you’re using is down.
MRM is targeted for a end of july release.

MRM slides (pdf)

2 - Maven.org

Maven.org is a sourceforge-like full featured software building and communication platform, including, Maven Repository manager, Subversion, Continuum, a wiki, a bugtracker, an Irc server and much more…. How all this components will work together I don’t know, check the slides or while you wait for them to be available the current Maven 2.1 design document.
Maven.org aims to be a product heading directly in competition with sourceforge or codebeamer.

maven.org (feynman) slides (pdf)

3 - Upcoming feature of Maven 2.1

Main features I picked up are that we are going to be able to use annotations in Maven Plugins (trough QDox, thus retaining jdk 1.4 compatibility), and the dependency resolver will be able to be exchanged or enhanced somehow to allow to compute dependencies differently. This is especially usefull for osgi application (read building Eclipse RCP application with Maven). There were much more, take a look a the slides.

As every OSSGTP meeting, we went to a bar, to continue exchanging on various topics. I had a chance to discuss with Jason a bit more especially on Mergere, which is a company who seems to run like any open source project (most employees are scattered around the globe, and if I’m not wrong work from home…). Well tell that to your beloved French manager and wait for the flak

Slides :
I’m currently waiting for the slides, they should come shortly.
Update July 31st :
I’ve received a link towards the slides a few hours ago, all slides are in pdf format :

• Maven Repository Manager
• Maven.org (Feynman)
• Introduction to Maven (presentation given at Maven Day in Paris)