Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

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"Did Maven folks include every possible scenario in markup?"

For me the main point of Maven is that you keep things simple and standard. By not deviating from a standard Maven web project structure and avoiding dependencies or build phases that need special care, I have projects that are simple to develop, build and package.

I am trying very hard to just depend on good behaving Maven dependencies and to stick to simple solutions. No more special build phases for code generation, no more crazy stuff. If I need some special build phase then I am probably doing it wrong.

The result of that is also that my projects are super simple. By avoiding special build phases I can pretty much load up a project in any IDE and just hit Run.

To me that is the true power of Maven. For that reason I don't want to look back at Ant or any of the fancy super flexible Groovy/Scala/Ruby build tools.

So contrary what many people think, Maven forces you to keep things simple. And I think that is a good thing in any project :)

'So contrary what many people think, Maven forces you to keep things simple.'

This is absolutely why I left Java development. Maven in my mind is anything but simple. It was always frustrating to use - this was 2.0 mind you, so maybe things have become easier, but I doubt it.

Even the terminology is totally abstract and complicated. I built a big project for a well known bank around '05-'06 and we had all kinds of problems with maven - we just went back to ant.

I used to love Java in the late 90's/early 00's. I remember the resistance to doing projects with it - it was new, unproven, etc, etc - just like Language X today. I worked with some people who built some cool things with 1.2. The collections framework was great.

But, then all the enterprise stuff started creeping in and everything was configured with gobs of crap xml. Demos would be given where you could edit the configuration via gui tools, but none of the devs I knew did this. Everyone hand edited everything.

Things like maven with their overly abstracted naming and concepts and Spring where everything is 'wired up' by tons of xml are what ultimately drove me away from Java. I just wanted to spend my time working on features instead of configuring things.

> back to ant

My experience is that people try to force Maven to be Ant. In particular, they want a single build to build all of the dependencies in one go. While this can bedone, my experience has been it makes a lot more sense just to keep each of your dependencies a separate project without trying to build everything all at once. It also encourages to build interfaces that change little instead of tying everything together.

> So contrary what many people think, Maven forces you to keep things simple. And I think that is a good thing in any project :)

Forcing you to something is anything but good.

I think he meant "Convention over Configuration"... you know, like Rails.

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