January 25, 2006

Why I hate maven


To quote the great Fred Eaglesmith "49 tons of diesel locomotive couldn't bring me back to you".

I have reached the stage of hating maven, I used to just mildly dislike it. In fact, if I had the time right now, I might just move my dependency management to Ivy. That isn't going to happen yet though.

  1. The useful plugins are all in beta
  2. There is close to no documentation for any plugin I want to use
  3. When I ask the user's list for lessons learned/documentation/whatever you want to call it - I don't even get a "you ignorant slut" for an answer.
  4. When I tried to get the code for the war task through svn - the war task is NO LONGER IN THE SVN REPOSITORY
  5. I can't get the scope of transitive dependencies

So, now all I use maven for is to build an eclipse classpath that I then edit so that my regular attributes (like src and docs) are in it.

I have written a nifty common war task though - although it uses excludesfile. What do you bet excludesfile gets deprecated in the next version of Ant? It would be just my luck.

Posted by liz at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

Syntactic Sugar

I usually spend the last half hour of work reading blogs related to my job. Even though I am not currently using Ruby or Rails I am still trying to keep up. I am also not doing much java (other than ant tasks) so I don't worry too much about it - Java is Java, and I am trying to get farther from it every day.

But, in reading blogs, it seems that I can't go even 1 day without reading the phrase "syntactic sugar". It seems to be the newest catch phrase, and it is beginning to annoy me. Also, I am not sure why so many people feel there shouldn't be such a thing.

People, if syntactic sugar makes my life easier, I am all for it. I really don't care if the compile takes another minute - ant and vulcan are managing that for me anyway. If you want to go back to barebones languages, I am sure we can find a PDP-11 somewhere for you.

One of our junior programmers today suggested that smart people had already solved the standardized build project. Hell, some of us have solved it 3 or 4 times. But each company has tradition and rules. A standardized build for Treasury is different from a standardized build for the small piece of DOD I am working for. Among other things, they solve different problems. And you have different big feet around that you don't want to step on. I still prefer my old build to the one I am now using, but I have to respect their work and build on it - not destroy it.

By the way, one of our really really FANTASTIC programmers has written a replacement for anthill/cruisecontrol. I am just getting used to it - it is excellent. Go look at Vulcan on sourceforge.

In other news, I have been doing almost nothing but ant for a few weeks. Ant sucks as a scripting language (as it should). I am still considering moving some of the scripting over to Ruby, but I have managed with Ant this long - I have just been informed that we simply don't have the time for me to refactor. The one project that should be done by march has turned into 13. Most of them are exactly alike (and we have a backup), but I am getting a bit concerned.

Posted by liz at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack