Thoughts on moving to Maven in an enterprise environment

Question

I'm interested in hearing from those who either A) use Maven in an enterprise environment or B) tried to use Maven in an enterprise environment.

I work for a large company that is contemplating bringing in Maven into our environment. Currently we use OpenMake to build/merge and home-grown software to deploy code to 100+ servers running various platforms (eg. WAS and JBoss). OpenMake works fine for us however Maven does have some ideal features, most importantly being dependency management, but is it viable in a large environment? Also what headaches have/did you incur, if any, in maintaining a Maven environment.

Side note, I've read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/861382/why-does-maven-have-such-a-bad-rep, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303853/what-are-your-impressions-of-maven, and a few other posts. It's interesting seeing the split between developers.

Answer 1

stackoverflow isn't meant to be for subjective questions and discussion, so to keep it brief:

is it viable in a large environment?

Yes, it's already in use in large environments, both across open source foundations and corporations.

A lot of what Maven provides through it's centralisation, reuse and easy sharing is designed to facilitate multiple different teams or organisations collaborating.

Like anything - you'll get out what you put in. Spend the time implementing the infrastructure you need and designing the organisational structure and project patterns that you'll need and it will pay back dividends.

I'm sure for more details you can find plenty of examples (positive and negative) across the web and particularly on the [email protected] list.