14/1/05.
Chaps,
I'm not sure of the background to this discussion, so I might be out of
kilter. However, you seem to be having a discussion about whether to
adopt Maven. The bit of AstroGrid that I work on (MySpace) was
converted to use Maven (not by me) a couple of months ago and I thought
it might be of interest if I reported my experiences.
I'm something of a convert, though I've only really been exposed to
using a project converted to Maven, and have done very little of the
work in the conversion.
The up-sides seem to be:
- it makes it very easy to build and deploy projects,
- it makes it extremely easy to run automatic (nightly) builds,
- it is easy to produce numerous, voluminous and customisable reports
(and some of them are very useful),
- it makes it easy to run tests as part of the automatic build process
(AstroGrid also uses JUnit tests for testing classes, and they are
something else that I'm a convert to, rather more so than Maven, in
fact).
The down-sides seem to be:
- Maven has very definite ideas about how a project should be structured
and arranged, and you attempt to change its ideas at your peril,
- it is complicated.
I can't really say what is involved in getting a project to use Maven,
as I wasn't involved. I've only subsequently made fairly minor tweaks
and they were perfectly tractable.
I'd have thought that if Starlink is switching to an `open source' model
where anyone can submit changes then the ability to do nightly builds/
tests/reports would be extremely useful. Conversely, how good Maven
would be at running tests and producing reports on the `Starlink
classic' Fortran, I'm not sure.
I get the impression that Norman seems to be doing quite a bit of the
work in putting the classic Starlink stuff in CVS. If he was at all
interested in using Maven in conjunction with this, it might be an idea
if he came across and had a chat with John Taylor, our local Maven
expert (assuming that John is agreeable). After all, its only 45 miles
(though allegedly they're the longest 45 miles in the world).
I don't know anything about Ant, so I've no idea how it and Maven compare.
HTH.
cheers,
Clive.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clive Davenhall Institute for Astronomy,
e-mail (internet, JANET): acd @ roe.ac.uk Royal Observatory Edinburgh,
fax from within the UK: 0131-668-8416 Blackford Hill, Edinburgh,
fax from overseas: +44-131-668-8416 EH9 3HJ, Scotland.
|