rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Monday, 16 September 2002

OK - so after prodding from Bob and James, I spent my second afternoon trying to get Maven to work today, and I have had some minor success. (After 3 hours of hacking I have my code compiling - no, I'm not an idiot at all ) Following on from Dave's thoughts (which are very good and I stole some of them) here are mine: Firstly, Maven looks very cool, sounds very sexy from reading the docs and a lot of people rave about it. I'm sure it is very useful for a lot of projects. Secondly, I have not made any final decision on using it yet, this is more a random stream of consciousness kind of blog entry. Thirdly, our project is very complex and has a lot of dependencies - the build.xml file is currently ~700 lines, and has over 20 dependencies (most of which aren't in ibiblio.org). Bad points I've encountered so far (I hope this list is helpful to Maven developers - please do not take it as offensive!): You have to throw away all of your existing Ant build file which can be very painful (I was under the impression Maven called out to Ant, not subsumed it!) It does take longer to run a simple build with Maven. The startup time can be irritating. It is a pain mapping libs from the repo directory to an IDE like (IDEA) I cannot run Maven from within IDEA yet It is very complicated to setup and migrate from Ant for a complex project - I assumed from reading the website it was fairly easy Following on from the above, there is no 'How do I migrade my Ant project to Maven?' I can't setup a mirrored repository (at least - I don't know how to). I want a repository inside our LAN, that if the file doesn't exist, goes to ibiblio.org - to save traffic, be faster, as risk insurance and to have our internal JARs on it "You can use all Ant tags - just no - signs in variables" The docs are very confusing and not enough (I know - it's open source, and thanks to #maven for helping out). Docs are always needed! It is ugly to separate project properties from local machine properties (in Ant we do this with a build.properties file for local props, and an init task for project ones) It forces you to think like a Jakarta project! This is not necessarily a 'best practice'! For example, my app doesn't produce a single JAR, it produces many different things. I'm sure this is just a default setup / more docs needed thing though. Good points: It forces you to specify in detail your dependencies (this is good!). I now know exactly which versions of which JARs I use. It downloads stuff automatically (uh... this is like, cool I guess?). The stuff you get 'for free' - for example it took me about 15 minutes to setup Clover into our build file the other day, I hear with Maven I get it instantly. I suppose with enough different 'plugins' this is a cool idea. There's uh... more that I haven't found yet. (This list is still under construction) In conclusion, Maven seems very good at the moment for simple components that rely on a lot of other components. It still has a lot of 'rough edges' but that is only to be expected. OK - well that's about all I can think of at this minute. For now, I'll go back to Ant, but I'm sure I'll post more next time I get the energy to hack at it again! 6:48:46 PM  comment []      David (Roller) likes Eclipse. 2:44:08 PM  comment []      CriticalMAS:. "Last night I created an ASP page that renders images. The script detects where the request is coming from and then pushes out an image. If the request is coming from my server it displays a good image. If the request is coming from a thief on an outside server, then I hand them one of PhotoDude's bandwidth images. [evhead] hahah sneaky! 2:41:13 PM  comment []      Another wicked calendar-tag idea (thinking more about what I just thought) - if the templating were done properly, outputting a vcalendar file from any calendar should be as simple as writing a new template (or plugging in an existing one). Why? Because then you could subscribe to that calendar in iCal, MozCal, Outlook etc! Imagine being able to see the JIRA issues assigned to you in your calendar software of choice - cool! 10:11:53 AM  comment []      Webby MVC (WebWork and Struts) - now I think Bob is a pretty smart guy, and he likes WW which means he is intelligent too, but even smart people can be stupid: So, why am I not using WebWork? It's not mavenized. Too many dependencies that don't currently exist in the ibiblio maven repository. So, what would get me using WebWork? If someone would either Mavenize WebWork, or at least point me to a tarball that I could use to easily get all WebWork-based jars into the ibiblio repository with the correct structure. Should WW be Maven-ized? I'm not sure. I haven't really got the experience with using Maven yet to know. It has a lot of buzz but so does everything from Jakarta and 90% of it is crap (no offense to anyone inappropriately tarred - James has shown me there are some good people there!). Should you not use a project because it's not Maven-ized? Hell no - that's ridiculous. Stupid even. If Maven can't deal with projects that don't use Maven, it should be fixed. Simple as that. Two simple thoughts: 1. The world won't all change to Maven no matter how good it is - deal with it 2. People like tools that play well with others and don't force them to do something a certain way (PS I'm sure Bob just wasn't thinking straight when he posted this - it was Saturday night afterall) 10:07:03 AM  comment []      More on The Calendar Saga. Options for MiniBlog Calendar Rick Salsa and Mike have been posting about the search for and potential development of an open source calendar tag. I found a calendar tag at Colbeans Software that has some nice functionality, but it isn't open source. [Niel Eyde] I agree with Rick - that tag is terrible. The HTML is hard coded, you can only modify the CSS properties, and you can't bind objects. I've been thinking about this some more, and without WebWork it is very hard to do You just cannot easily do it in a generic JSP tag. Here are some of the other features I would like to see: Pluggable Rendering Template Akin to how the other WebWork UI tags work, I could define a few different calendar rendering templates. For example the calendar in my blog (top right) and a full screen calendar (like the Apple movie release calendar) could be represented using the same tag but different template. Object Binding For a calendar tag to be useful, it would need a custom calendar object model, with arbitrary object binding. For example, I would like to add a calendar to JIRA (JRA-412) that showed issue data in a visual format. Why? Because no other issue tracker can do this, and it would present a very interesting view of the data. How would it work? Well in my action I would determine which month was being presented on screen, use the incoming parameters to determine what sort of information is required (ie dates issue created? resolve dates? due dates?) and look it up. I would then bind the objects to the relevant days (ie calendarModel.addToDate("15/09/02", issueGV)). The cool thing about this style (it's really just MVC folks!) is that I could then have different binding mechanisms, ie calendarModel.addToWeek("15/09/02", issueGV) and the object would be added to each day in the week. Or calendarModel.addToDate(Monday, issueGV) and the issue would be bound to every Monday. On the template side you would then need two templates, one for the 'month' (which knows how to present an HTML table for the whole month) and one for the 'day' (which knows how to retrieve the objects for that day, and how to display thm).   Now maybe this is too complex to do in a single tag (or too custom) but I do think it could work. Maybe I'll hack at it later today if I get a chance. Of course if we wanted to be 'buzz-compliant' we could add support for ICS somehow, so the calendar tag could output an XML file readable by iCal and Mozilla calendar. 9:53:02 AM  comment []      Financial Companies Ask IM Companies To Work Together [Slashdot] "I think the message I got was: Either you guys do something about it, as we are your customers, or we're going to take matters into our hands. They will start picking vendors who have better strategic thinking about interoperability," he said. "Interoperability is more a business decision than a technology decision." Interesting - if you had to think of an industry to press for new technology interoperability, I doubt it would be investment banking. 9:36:34 AM  comment []      OK, so we had iCal last week, and now Mozilla Calendar this week. You'd think calendaring was a simple application that had been solved eons ago. Did the world just discover time management or something? 9:31:32 AM  comment []      LoTR:LEGO Originals - now this is pretty cool. 9:19:31 AM  comment []      Atkins. My wife wants us to start a diet. At 89 kg per 187 cm I'm not that much overweight, but losing a few kilos won't do me any harm and I want to reinforce her determination. [...] [Be Blogging] So many people are trying the Atkins diet now - it's very intriguing. I can't work out how I survive without carbohydrates though. No bread, pasta, noodles or rice? Man - that's 90% of my diet. 9:10:03 AM  comment []      hehe Tobias has issue linking mania about JIRA 1.4: I love the issue linking feature. We had a wild and crazy issue linking session at work today, which resulted in a dramatically improved view of how some of the issues are related to each other. It was a great deal of fun and most certainly really helpful. [Tobiased thoughts] I love the idea of a wild and crazy issue linking session! Who would have thought bug tracking could be that much fun? (PS All of Tobias' bugs are fixed in 1.4.1) 9:03:01 AM  comment []