Some stories from a user

Hello!

I've been enjoying the recent flurry of JDEE activity.  Thanks everyone, keep it up!  I've tried JDEE now and again over the years, because I love emacs (though I'm still a novice).

But, I always go back to Eclipse.  Sometimes I'll open a .java file in Emacs in fundamental-mode to do some text manipulations.  Eclipse doesn't have c-x (!

I think I see conversation participants not grokking each other on the subject of Maven.  Maybe I can help.

Maven is this huge thing in the corporate slave/java dev's life.  It's not *really* a build tool.  Neither is emacs isn't an email client!  ...It's a poor analogy, but stick with me...  (Unless you find the following very obvious--in that case, it's for the other reader!) 

Maven is a dependency manager.  Here's how it works:

I'm hacking on CoolClass.java and I want it to tokenize some strings.  My DWIM Java hacking environment (Eclipse) has some shortcut keys... c-SPC does completion on a class name.  So:

    foo = new StrTo[c-SPC]

should expand to:

    foo = new StrTokenizer(

(at least.)  But, I don't have the jar for the library that contains that utility class on my classpath!

Enter Maven.  I use a web search engine (or built-in Eclipse feature, but it's not very good) to find this: http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails|org.apache.commons|commons-lang3|3.4|jar

Then, I add this to my project's (existing) pom.xml:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
        <version>3.4</version>
    </dependency>

As soon as I hit save, I can go back to CoolClass.java and hit c-SPC again.  It will work.

Maven didn't just download the jar I specified and save it somewhere in the project.  It first consulted the user-wide cache of previously downloaded jars.  Maven also checked if the library I requested depends on other libraries and downloaded them, too (recursively).

Not only that, but my dev environment can now magically pull up the JavaDocs for the new class.  If I start debugging and step into that class, Maven will download the source code for me, too.  (Actually, I guess Eclipse invoked mvn several times to perform each of those actions individually.)

Maven is also a community.  There is such a thing as doing things "the maven way".  (Note: I'm a novice!  If you are too, just have a look at the 20kb POM I linked above, maybe even before the Maven homepage.)

To be clear: I'm not saying JDEE must do things the maven way, but I am saying that acknowledging that it exists, and that an Eclipse way exists, will do a lot to help JDEE grow, and help me use it.

Powerful refactoring is more important, but I have no fear that Emacs will excel at that.  I leave it in your capable hands.

Well, this email is too long already.  But, I hope it has been helpful.

Cheers,
--Dave

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