Maven replacement?

Question

What would you suggest as a replacement to the Maven Java build toolset? Just plain Ant scripts? SCons?

Answer 1

It depends on what you use anyway. Maven 1? Maven 2? I find Maven 2 decently documented, and quite powerful, when used in combination with Ant tasks and some home baked Java plugins.

There are Ant tasks to use Maven features from Ant: http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html . So you don't really need to write your own "library".

And you can call Ant from Maven: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/ .

You can also script things using Groovy for example: http://groovy.codehaus.org/GMaven+-+Executing+Groovy+Code .

Or just write Java code for the custom bits you need: http://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-development.html .

There's no reason not to mix and match, when you can do it ;)

Answer 2

While I like the idea of Maven, I always find myself fighting it for anything but the simplest configurations. Its architecture is plugin-based, and the quality of the plugins varies widely. Documentation is sketchy at best; half the time I can't figure out if the doc I'm reading is for Maven 1 or 2. And how often have you had to resort to using the maven-ant-plugin to do something basic?

I've been using Apache Ivy for about a year now, and I'm pretty happy with it. There is a bit of a learning curve though. But there's an active mailing list, and the author is very responsive.

What I ended up doing was writing a "library" of a few simple Ant targets such as "resolve", "compile", "install", etc. that expect things to be in standard Maven places (such as src/main/java) and then <import> the targets into my various projects. This way you get the best of both worlds- Maven-style configuration, and all the power of Ant.