October 27, 2005
Back in the saddle
I have been working at the new company for about 4 days (I did NO coding/design/headwork during my vacation). Luckily, they want me to do what I am good at. Right now it is working with maven.
Yes, I still hate Maven. I also think that it is where we are going to go for at least some of our projects. Maven 2 has been released, and I am now extending it's eclipse plugin. I want it to learn how to update a .classpath, and how to include src and javadoc resources when building a .classpath from a POM. I am hoping that this will get around what we consider to be weaknesses within both eclipse and maven.
While doing this, I am making use of the plexus toolkit (because maven already uses it). Excellent toolkit. I would do some things differently, but I was able to get used to it in 1 day. It is going to become part of those files that I carry around with me from project to project and job to job.
After I get this all finished we will make a decision about how much farther to go with maven. Right now we are just going to go with standardizing resources every developer needs to be able to find. This means that some developers will have to do things differently, but I am NOT the person who has to enforce Best Practices here.
It is so much fun working with a crew of really bright people again. I swear, I haven't worked with a crew like this since I got my dream junior programmer at Nasdaq.
Posted by liz at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2005
Changing spaces
Today is my last day at Company M. I am taking a week or so off to relax, knit and work on the 3 opensource projects I am committed to. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to persuade myself that I could actually work on 3 projects in my copious spare time. Especially seeing that my pair programmer for the big one just moved across the country from me. But, that isn't what I am blogging about.
What I am blogging about is Maven2. I am one of those fanatic maven haters. It bit me in the ass when I first started here, and I (with company blessing) took all the code OUT of maven. Actually, there are pieces of maven I like, mostly the war and jar plugins. But, they aren't worth the maven workaround.
I am a software nazi. I believe in a standard build structure. Unfortunately, my standard build structure is not the same as maven2's standard build structure. m2 has a tree that starts as src/target (fine so far). But src then splits into main and test. Then both of these break into java and resources. It just lost me there. I think that the use of main adds complexity. Mine starts as src/test. They both then split into java and config. I could rename config, but I think that it is actually more descriptive than resources, which has a very specific meaning in java. Both are perfectly acceptable build structures, but I don't want to user the main style build. I could (and might) change my build to mirror the m2 build, but I am still not sure how well it would work.
I am also still working on adding a ruby on rails project inside a project.
What I loved maven for was the ability to pull jars/poms from ibiblio. I am going to look at ivy next week and see if it will work to pull my dependency tree instead. If it does as good a job (or better) than m2, I will stop thinking about m2.
BTW, one of the things I HATE about m2 is that it STOPS pulling all the dependencies and chokes the minute it needs to use a sun library.
Posted by liz at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack