Maven founder proposes Eclipse marriage
Membership has its advantages
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
The team that founded Apache's Maven project has joined Eclipse to marry their popular framework and repository with the Eclipse platform and projects.
Engineers from Sonatype, the corporate backers of Maven, have also joined the Eclipse board, where they'll play a part in the open-source group's architectural direction. Sonatype has become a strategic member.
Jason van Zyl, Apache Maven founder and also founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, told The Reg he'd lobby for his Java build-and-release framework and repository to be integrated with the next version of Eclipse, due in just under a year. The idea is for Sonatype's Maven plug in for Eclipse, M2Eclipse, to ship with Eclipse 3.5 - a first version of M2Eclipse is due by the end of September.
Integration will mean working with more than 20 other Eclipse projects, judging by past years' Eclipse releases - Europa and Ganymede.
Van Zyl said efforts to integrate Maven and the Eclipse Web Tools Project and AspectJ are getting the biggest interest from those in the community. Also, he's looking towards integration between Eclipse's OSGi-based runtime project, Equinox.
Sonatype will put OSGi-based Ganymede bundles in the Maven central repository in the "near future", according to van Zyl. Further out, Sonatype plans tools making it possible to search for OSGi components inside Maven and to consume them.
The Maven repository is home to 57,000 artifacts and 2,000 projects spanning SourceForge, Apache, Eclipse and ObjectWeb. There are already some OSGi components, but van Zyl's goal is for Maven to provide the main, public repository infrastructure that's currently missing for OSGi components.
Van Zyl also hopes Maven can become part of Eclipse's Dash project for building new versions of the Eclipse platform.
"Being part of Eclipse and the build and release team will help us create coherence between Maven and Eclipse," van Zyl said. "Our prime goal is to get Maven married with Eclipse and OSGi."®
COMMENTS
Wrong way round...
The Maven repository is a security mess. Eclipse's authenticates plugins and updates.
It would be better for Maven to use Eclipse's update mechanism to download and authenticate packages than for Eclipse to download packages from Maven's global repositories.
A Netbeans troll speaks!
I agree with Steven Dick: a build system is a build system is a build system; it should be independent of the underlying IDE. There's no reason I'd stop using Maven if they strive for stronger integration with Eclipse, *provided* that they don't exclude other IDEs.
If they did, Maven would simply fork and the Eclipse-only version would wither away. It's just too useful to become dependent on Eclipse. One of the reasons I switched from Eclipse to Netbeans was that Eclipse's build process back then required the IDE to be locally installed (don't know if that's still true; probably not) while Netbeans used Ant as its default. In any case, this is definitely a Chicken Little story.
Now for the troll: Has anyone noticed that the quality of Eclipse is inversely proportional to the size of its governance board? Do they really want new members? Software by committee has never been a good idea.
(I'd rather have a "WTF?" icon to display my amazement at this fluff, but the thumbs-down would have to do.)
It's a flipping build system!
This story reads as a piece of crud. Maven's a build system (on steroids)!
Eclipse works with all the other popular build systems, so, wow, it's going to get better Maven support. About time, because the current level of integration is crap.
From the unscientific sample of the open source frameworks I use, they're almost 100% maven-based.
It's interesting that M2Eclipse is going to be included with Eclipse 3.5 because the Google-backed q4e was recently chosen as the official Maven plugin for Eclipse! Maybe they are merging?
I do plugin development, so I wouldn't mind seeing some better build tools for PDE (Eclipse's plugin bit). Anyone who's needed to automate a build of Eclipse plugins knows what I'm talking about. It's painful.
@CTG: why would better integration between Maven and Eclipse bother users of IntelliJ or Netbeans? Currently IntelliJ has better support for Groovy (a Java-based scripting language), but I don't go in the huff and avoid Groovy use in Eclipse.
The previous report on Eclipse and Maven was also a pile of rubbish: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/eclipse_maven_plugin/
Eclipse and Maven striving for the power of Visual Studio! Don't make me laugh. Visual Studio has long been surpassed as the best example of a developer's IDE.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
