Maven replacement?

Question

What would you suggest as a replacement to the Maven Java build toolset? Just plain Ant scripts? SCons?

Answer 1

I'm fond of using Ant with Ivy. Ivy uses Maven repositories to fetch library dependencies without forcing you to change your entire build system to suit Maven.

Answer 2

I've been using buildr for some of my projects. Very terse and readable build scripts (no xml) and it uses maven repos (with trivial effort, maven 1 and maven 2).

I was looking for something post-maven1 to work on for some projects and m2 wasn't all that appealing. Maven had already left all m1 users high and dry with the need to redo all of their build systems (and some of mine cannot be expressed in m2 as far as I can tell).

Answer 3

While I like the idea of Maven, I always find myself fighting it for anything but the simplest configurations. Its architecture is plugin-based, and the quality of the plugins varies widely. Documentation is sketchy at best; half the time I can't figure out if the doc I'm reading is for Maven 1 or 2. And how often have you had to resort to using the maven-ant-plugin to do something basic?

I've been using Apache Ivy for about a year now, and I'm pretty happy with it. There is a bit of a learning curve though. But there's an active mailing list, and the author is very responsive.

What I ended up doing was writing a "library" of a few simple Ant targets such as "resolve", "compile", "install", etc. that expect things to be in standard Maven places (such as src/main/java) and then <import> the targets into my various projects. This way you get the best of both worlds- Maven-style configuration, and all the power of Ant.

Answer 4

I would go with buildr, if i am expecting complex build targets in my build. The benefit is, you are not dependent on any particular library at all. You have all the APIs from Ruby to do whatever you want; unlike Ivy in which case you are still tied up to ANT. Effort of migration to Ivy is worth if you want to introduce library dependency to an already established ANT based build mechanism which does all the operations you want to do.

Answer 5

There are at least three different parts of Maven: the repository, the implementation independent lifecyle and the conventions for a default project. Using Ivy provides only the repository.

I've not used it but I think that easyant is designed to be a more complete replacement to Maven. It uses Ivy as the repository but then adds conventions and standard modules.

Answer 6

I really like using ant4eclipse - you set up your project dependencies in eclipse as normal and you can write a single ant script that'll build all the projects in the right order.

For third-party libs, you can either set up a single eclipse project containing (and exporting) all of your jars [I DON'T RECOMMEND THIS], or a separate project for each third-party lib, exporting the jar. [I recommend the latter b/c you can track project->third-party deps and upgrade parts when needed.]

Answer 7

It depends on what you use anyway. Maven 1? Maven 2? I find Maven 2 decently documented, and quite powerful, when used in combination with Ant tasks and some home baked Java plugins.

There are Ant tasks to use Maven features from Ant: http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html . So you don't really need to write your own "library".

And you can call Ant from Maven: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/ .

You can also script things using Groovy for example: http://groovy.codehaus.org/GMaven+-+Executing+Groovy+Code .

Or just write Java code for the custom bits you need: http://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin-development.html .

There's no reason not to mix and match, when you can do it ;)