Comments on: Ivy is everything Maven should have/could have been 2.5 years ago

by: Nobody

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 06:58:27 +0000

Not to criticize your position, but your blog entry is misleading some people to conclude maven is bad and ivy is good, thus they need to use ivy becasue you said so. Even though you stated pretty clearly, I don’t know if people are understanding ivy is good only when you have a existing ant based build system. Maven, while not perfect, takes care of a lot of tedious (and often buggy) stuff in your build system - creating jar, war, compiling, testing etc, which have to be implemented by yourself in ant world as you pointed out, and usually in ad hoc fashion, which again you pointed out.

I’m not a strong maven advocate or anything but I think everybody who have used both ant and maven should see the value maven brings to the table.

BTW, I am saying this because transitive deps is not a huge issue for me in our project which include 6-7 single project and a couple of multi-projects, because we are also relying maven to manage our eclipse classpath. So we have to explicitly declare all the dependencies anyway. I just fear that if we manage it manually, we will eventually get out of sync from maven build and eclipse build. (Do you have a good solution for this?).

Lastly, before talking about maven for its lack of transitive dependencies (which I do not disagree with your point), I’d like to point out that it’s a flaw in java’s jar packaging design, which they are trying to fix, which is 5-6 years too late. sun just should hire super smart small talk guy and implement all the small talk features and get it over with.

by: Carlos Sanchez's Weblog

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 13:21:57 +0000

Maven vs. Ant + Ivy

There was some interesting discussion lately about Ivy. It started with Colin’s blog entry about Ivy and transitive dependencies.
I think that if you decide to use Ant you’d better use something like Ivy to manage the dependencies in a painless …

by: A Couple of Dutch Rants » Blog Archive » Ant vs Maven and dependency management

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:42:11 +0000

[…] le of interesting other articles / posts: Dion on Colin’s observation of Ivy Colin on Ivy Arjen on objected-o […]

by: Colin Sampaleanu

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:41:07 +0000

My understanding (as per a discussion at TSSJS a few days ago with somebody) is that Jason Van Zyl actually has Maven 2 running in almost final form, and it includes transitive dependencies. However, the problem here is that there’s essentially no external visibility for Maven 2. For all I know, it may be another 3 years before it’s actually out. On top of that, Maven _is_ another tool entirely, and switching over to it from ant requires scrapping your ant build completely, or maintaining two build systems separately. The attraction to something like Ivy is that it takes care of one of the biggest problems when using Ant with multi-project builds, while still allowing most of the ant build to be used as-is. Together with a base build system that is imported from (resulting in a build script of only a few lines in each project), the value proposition for Maven (at least Maven 1) is smaller and smaller.

However, I’ll certainly give Maven 2 a try when it’s available.

by: Peter

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:21:35 +0000

I totally agree that Maven needs transitive dependency support added - it baffles me that it’s still not in there (and some may remember that it was originally slated for 1.1, then quietly slipped out to 2.0 with nary an explanation). That being said, I’ve completely had enough of Ant too, even with the 1.6 improvements and a bunch of external plugins to cover some of its more glaring deficiencies.

But enough whinging - I’m wondering whether it might be possible to get the best of both worlds by integrating something like Ivy with Maven? After all Maven uses Ant under the hood, and presumably it’s possible to extend that Ant instance with plugins and expose them as Maven goals or what-have-you.

Has anyone tried doing this, or thought about doing it?