I’ve never had the joy of working with Maven directly — every time one of my projects get near it, there’s a developer revolt and we end up hand-rolling the project build/deploy tools through Ant files and shell scripts. This approach is not as painful as it used to be, but it seems like there should exist a business-standard tool that you can drop into your project to do the common build/deployment tasks.

From everyone I hear, though, Maven is not that tool. The refrain is constantly “Good theory, bad implementation”. I couldn’t get a real constructive critique out of it until I stumbled across this blog post:

One of the things that concerns me with Maven is that for a tool whose goal is to be a “project comprehension tool” (giving quick access to Java source, Javadoc and other reports) it’s almost impossible to find the source or get any insight into how Maven is built. Yet so much about Maven is impossible to find, with broken links, missing and out of date documentation, and other hazards running rampant.

I’ve been hunting around for 30+ minutes, trying to find the source to MavenCli. It’s in the maven-core library. Good luck finding a link to that off the Maven web site. Through arcane means and Google searches I eventually stumbled across http://maven.apache.org/ref/ but 2.0.7 is not present there. So they rolled out a release without external documentation? I guess that’s OK when you need a magical incantation to even find the documentation.

Well, I’m getting closer to my answers, but I’m probably still shiv’ed because Maven developer guidelines mandate zero documentation in the source. Or anywhere else. In fact, I believe the maven-fuckyou-plugin exists to strip documentation out of your source and seems to be enabled by default in all the Maven modules.

(Note: This also feeds into my “Agile development does not mean commentless code” rant that I’ve been storing up…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Trackback URI | Comments RSS