Abusing Maven For Fun Or Profit

Wow! 45 people came out to hear Brian Sletten talk about how he was able to
"tweak" Maven 2 to automate deploying application upgrades to 2000
installations.  These strategies can be used to automate the distribution of
your applications.

Admittedly, this stragety requires tweaking Maven 2. This may not be worth
it, considering the technologies on the horizon.

   - Capistrano/Switch Tower
   - JSR 277 Module System
   - Spring-OSGi bundles

On the other hand, these technologies may not be as flexible as we would
like. Maven 2 allows for customized solutions.

Are we talking about Jelly Scripting? No! Not in Maven 2. Brian Stetten
developed his solution with about 200 lines of Java code. Maven 2 has
exposed its feature set through a Java-based API.

This solution is transactionally safe. If something goes wrong half way
through the process, Maven 2 supports rollback. Or, a rollback can be
triggered manually.

Multiple Maven repositories can be supported and they can be local or
remote.

Maven 2 can access the source respository via

   - a shared file system
   - ftp
   - internal ssh
   - external ssh

Maven 2 supports md5 and sha1 checksums and can be configured to use JSSE
keystores. This allows Maven 2 to only allow trusted clients to pull
content.

Maven 2 can be configured to deploy new versions based on version numbers or
based on changed checksum. Either way, the client can maintain several
versions of the application, allowing for rollback functionality.

Maven 2 supports transitive dependencies. This allows an application to only
have to specify a short list of dependencies, allowing these dependencies to
transitively extend the list of dependencies. This can also be used to
rollback one set of new functionality, while leaving other new functionality
deployed, based on dependencies on the changed components.

Does this mean we first have to convert our Maven utilities to Maven 2? No.
We can continue to use our Maven utilities while creating new utilities
using Maven 2.

_______________________________________________
Juglist mailing list
[email protected]
http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org