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State-of-the-Art Build Production for the Modern Software Enterprise
Updated: 2 hours 20 min ago

How To Configure the Maven-Jetty Plugin for OpenEJB

4 hours 37 min ago

Many of you are developing with light-weight servlet containers such as Jetty or Tomcat.  While these platforms lend themselves to rapid application development, they often force you to forgo some of the benefits of running in a larger application server.  One of the most challenging tasks is finding a way to integrate a transaction manager into a simpler servlet-container without adding too much complexity to your configuration.  In this post, Stephen Connolly demonstrates how configure the maven-jetty-plugin to start Jetty with OpenEJB.

To read the full post, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

10 Maven Myths Debunked!

Wed, 03/10/2010 - 19:34

We found this great blog post about the top 10 myths surrounding Maven.  The article offers in depth analysis of these Maven myths, a thorough debunking of each one, and constructive ways to take action if you still disagree.  To read the full article, click here.

Maven has been a real joy for me. It could be the simple fact that I can move from colleague to colleague’s project without wondering what ant tasks are available or where the files are. It could be the fact I don’t have to configure IDE’s anymore, not even for downloading sources. It could be some of my favorite plug-ins. Maybe it’s the 250,739 artifacts that are available in three lines of copy paste declaration. There’s a lot to love.

Thanks for the props!

 
Categories: Companies

Adding Dependencies Using m2eclipse

Wed, 03/10/2010 - 17:20

This video demonstrates how easy it is to add dependencies using m2eclipse.    Because m2eclipse understands how to interact with a repository index, it can quickly locate a dependency by class name or by GAV coordinate.    Don’t know which artifact contains a particular class?   Just start writing code and use an Eclipse Quick Fix to search all Maven repositories for an artifact that contains a particular class.    Want to inspect and browse a Maven repository? Don’t use a web browser.  Use the built-in dependency search feature in m2eclipse.

 
Categories: Companies

The ‘Bottom Line’ in the Maven – Ant Debate

Tue, 03/09/2010 - 19:40

Much has been said in the blogosphere about the differences between Maven and Ant.  Lines have been drawn between tech bloggers, and one thing has become clear; people love to argue about Maven versus Ant.  And we love the debate.  Constructive criticism is what keeps companies fresh, and products user-friendly.  Here is another chapter in the debate:

Standardization of build systems is one of the main benefits that Maven brought to the world. If you know one Maven project, you can switch to any other project built with Maven and feel comfortable immediately. This increases productivity, both personally and for your company, which is one of the reasons more and more companies switch over from Ant to Maven.

To read the full post, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

P2 in Final Round of Eclipse Community Awards!

Tue, 03/09/2010 - 19:08

Sonatype is excited to announce that p2 is one of the finalists for the Eclipse Community Award!  P2 is a finalist in the ‘most open project’ category.  The winners will be announced at EclipseCon 2010 on March 22.  Sonatype’s Pascal Rapicault was also nominated in the ‘Top Committer’ category.  To watch a screencast of Sonatype’s p2 support, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

Sonatype Maven Meetup in Philadelphia

Fri, 03/05/2010 - 18:39

Register today for the Sonatype Maven Meetup being held this April.  The meetup will take place in Philadelphia at the Sheraton Society Hill, on April 7, 2010.

The meetup will focus on development infrastructure technologies, offering talks and workshops led by core contributors and package maintainers.

Sessions in two tracks will cover tools such as the Apache Maven build and release manager, Hudson continuous integration engine, Nexus repository manager, Sonar quality server and other technologies widely used by software developers around the world.

Register for the Sonatype Maven Meetup at www.sonatype.com/meetup2010

 
Categories: Companies

The Inside Scoop on Maven and JRuby Integration

Thu, 03/04/2010 - 01:10

Today Charles Nutter, core member of JRuby, discussed two projects that integrate JRuby and Maven, and the implications of this interoperability.  The first is a prototype Maven server that will make any Java library installable as a gem.

Let me repeat that: ANY Java library in the world, installable as a gem. This means you can also use Maven artifacts as dependencies in regular Ruby gems, and it additionally means we won’t have to re-release jar files into their own duplicate gems on the standard repositories. It’s very exciting.

The second project is Polyglot Maven, which was started by Jason van Zyl and the folks at Sonatype.

That project intends to provide standard DSLs for popular JVM languages, allowing you to use those languages in place of the XML-based POM files so many people hate.

To read the entire interview with JRuby’s Charles Nutter, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

The Benefits of Migrating to Nexus Maven Repository Manager

Tue, 03/02/2010 - 22:26

Word keeps spreading about our Java.net Maven Rescue Misson taking place Friday March 5, 2010.  And Maven users and non-Maven users alike are excited to take advantage of the offer.  If you’re not sure whether to take up Sonatype on their offer to migrate your Maven Repository infrastructure over to our hosted Nexus OSS instance, this post offers some great insight.

Providing free maven repos I think has a lot of benefits and not just for maven users. For example, this should benefit all dependency management tools that are built on top of maven repos… Another benefit is being able to standardize on maven repositories, hopefully preventing users from searching where they can find your artifacts. I’ve wasted a lot of time in the past trying to find valid repositories where I could find artifacts for a project I was wanting to use.

To read the full post, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

Customer Success Story: Intuit Migrates to Maven and Nexus Professional

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 21:20

Intuit has streamlined its software development lifecycle by migrating to Maven and Nexus Professional.

Intuit, Inc. provides business and financial management solutions for small and medium sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers, and accounting professionals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The company offers QuickBooks financial and business management software and services, technical support, financial supplies, and Web site design and hosting services for small businesses; and small business payroll products and services, as well as merchant services comprising credit and debit card processing, electronic check conversion, and automated clearing house services.

It also provides TurboTax income tax preparation products and services for consumers and small business owners; Lacerte and ProSeries professional tax products and services, and QuickBooks Premier Accountant Edition and the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program for accounting professionals. In addition, Intuit offers outsourced online banking services for banks and credit unions, as well as Quicken personal finance products and services, Intuit real estate solutions. The company was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Business problem:

Prior to implementing Maven and Nexus Professional, Java projects were mostly built with Ant, and sometimes by the IDE. After migrating builds to Maven, software artifacts were not managed using Nexus.  The artifacts were not reliably available and builds were not always reliable.

Intuit employs a software development methodology where geographically distributed teams write, test, and then publish components for local or distributed use.  Open source components are also used within the company.  In order to support this approach, the company needed a new way to reliably share components.  Intuit was looking to improve developer productivity while maintaining control over what third-party artifacts were used by the teams.

Why Maven and Nexus Professional?

In their search for a new solution, Intuit engineers saw that open source artifacts are much easier to manage and build with Maven. They were further convinced by the fact that many open source projects are using Maven.

Intuit chose Nexus Professional based on its higher performance compared to competing products, as well as P2 repository support, staging, and procurement features. Sonatype’s Nexus Professional support was also very important.

Results:

After a transition period following the implementation of Maven, Intuit has begun to standardize company-wide on Maven for building its software. Teams are benefiting from seamless integration with systems such as Sonar, Hudson, and many other tools currently in use inside the company.

Nexus Professional has been providing a very stable platform for repository management of internal and third-party artifacts. Several business units have successfully utilized the staging feature, allowing the teams to be instantly in sync on internally developed artifacts, and virtually eliminating mis-communication about which components should be used for which projects.

By switching to Maven and Nexus Professional, Intuit was able to build a complete Continuous Integration system including testing and static analysis tools with a minimum of effort.

Core benefits of migrating to Maven and Nexus:

  • Ability to coordinate component reuse between multiple teams
  • Ability to deal with high-complexity projects
  • Increased team productivity
  • Increased stability of the development infrastructure

Company Profile:

  • Intuit Inc., Mountain View, CA
  • Web address: www.intuit.com
  • Company size: Approx 5000 employees – Number of developers: Approx. 500
  • Software used in the environment: Hudson, Sonar, Clover, Perforce, JBoss, Oracle, and others
 
Categories: Companies

DZone Gets to the Bottom of the Maven Rescue Mission

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 17:39

This week DZone chatted with Sonatype’s Jason van Zyl about the upcoming Maven Rescue Mission.  They discuss why Java.net’s Maven infrastructure is causing developers so many headaches, how Nexus OSS can save you from Java.net hell, and the final straw that became the catalyst for the Maven Rescue Mission on March 5.

The Maven repository infrastructure at Java.net is very difficult for a Maven-based project to use…The Nexus OSS infrastructure provides the easiest way for Maven-based projects to publish their artifacts.

To read the full DZone article, click here.

 
Categories: Companies

Nexus Book Update: Nexus 1.5 Content and Community-driven Corrections

Sat, 02/27/2010 - 17:48

The latest edition of Repository Management with Nexus, Edition 2.1, has been released. This edition includes new content about Nexus 1.5.0 Open Source and Enterprise LDAP. Edition 2.1 also contains almost 100 corrections which were driven by the community.

The following changes were introduced in Edition 2.1 in February, 2010:

The following individuals provided valuable feedback resulting in fixes and changes in Edition 2.1:

  • Anders Hammar
  • Brian Demers
 
Categories: Companies

Maven 3 Presentation at Devnexus 2010 in Atlanta

Fri, 02/26/2010 - 22:10

Devnexus 2010 is the annual Professional Developer Conference, and is being held in Atlanta on March 8 and 9.  Sonatype’s Jason van Zyl will be in Atlanta on March 8 to give a presentation on Maven 3 and Next Generation Development Infrastructure.  The presentation will cover the future of Maven, Maven 3, the release of m2eclipse 1.0, and the move towards a standardized development stack that includes tools like Maven, Hudson, m2eclipse, and Nexus.

This discussion will focus not only on the tools individually, but how they can work together to create a best practices approach to building and delivering your software in your organization.

For more information on Devnexus 2010 visit the conference website.  Devnexus 2010 is sponsored by the Atlanta Java User Group.

 
Categories: Companies

“Maven 3: Reloaded” Presentation from Devoxx ‘09

Fri, 02/26/2010 - 12:00

Parleys.com has just published my “Maven 3: Reloaded” presentation from Devoxx ‘09. In this presentation, I put our current focus on Maven 3 in context and talk about some of the upcoming technologies like Polyglot Maven and Maven Shell. In this video you’ll see me demonstrate POM translation from XML to Groovy, discuss the ways in which Maven 3 changes allow m2eclipse to embed Maven, and some of the work we’ve done in Tycho to provide a path for OSGi developers.

You watch this embedded video, or watch the presentation over on the Parleys.com site.

Note: To switch between the slides and the video of me talking, click on the smaller video in the upper right-hand of this video embed.

 
Categories: Companies

“Save Pain and Improve Your Release Cycle” with Nexus OSS

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 20:11

Good news travels fast, and word about our Java.net Maven Repository Rescue Mission is getting a positive response.

I guess we can say the java.net repository is a little broken…But there is a good news! Sonatype is opening it’s Nexus OSS instance to all java.net projects.

This blog entry details a few examples of the headaches that the Java.net repository has caused.  You can read the full blog entry here.  As promised, on March 5th we will start servicing all requests to switch Java.net projects over from their Maven Repository infrastructure to our Nexus OSS Instance.

If you use Maven and deploy on java.net, I think that’s a good opportunity to save pain and improve your release cycle!  
Categories: Companies

Java.net Maven Repository Rescue Mission on March 5th

Wed, 02/24/2010 - 22:17

There are numerous problems with the Maven repositories on Java.net, and individual projects are being penalized for poor development infrastructure at Java.net. We hear no end of complaints about the poor quality of Maven Repositories at Java.net: mixing of Maven 1 and Maven 2 repositories, the mixing of releases and snapshots, lack of javadocs, sources, signatures, bad project metadata, and general inability of Java.net to provide any coherent means of delivering valid repository content to the Maven community.

This is not a problem with any particular project at Java.net, it’s the infrastructure provided by Java.net that isn’t up to par. You need to provide a decent Maven repository infrastructure for projects to deploy their content to, and you need to provide instructions about best practices on how accomplish this properly. Java.net has done neither, so I figured instead of continuing to complain –and continuing to field the complaints of Maven users– I’m going to do something about it.

On March 5th, 2010 Juven Xu and Marvin Froeder from Sonatype will start servicing any and all requests from Java.net projects to migrate their Maven Repository infrastructure over to our hosted Nexus OSS instance. We will, of course, continue to service requests after March 5th, but March 5th will be set aside to specifically help Java.net projects get switched over and tested.

We generally ask that projects interested in our OSS hosting service familiarize themselves with our guide for OSS Repository Hosting. If you follow the guide and make your request we will process the requests on a first come, first serve basis on March 5th. We’ve helped close to 100 projects now and we’d love to help the projects at Java.net!

 
Categories: Companies

How to Contribute to the Maven Books

Tue, 02/23/2010 - 11:28

Manfed Moser, the author of the newly released Android chapter in Maven: The Complete Reference, wrote a very quick step-by-step set of instructions for people interested in contributing to the Maven book. Read the whole post here: http://www.simpligility.com/2010/02/how-to-contribute-to-the-maven-books/

Here’s an excerpt:

The first thing you will have to do is get the source code – after all the books are open source licensed and freely available to anyone. The books are found on github at http://github.com/sonatype/ and in the case of the reference book at http://github.com/sonatype/maven-reference-en. With the excellent help on github you can just fork the repository and get your own copy going locally. My copy for example is at http://github.com/mosabua/maven-reference-en

Now thanks to the power of Maven and its conventions you get the book created as HTML website and PDF document by running, surprise, mvn clean install  
Categories: Companies

Update to Maven Complete Reference: Flexmojos and Android (Edition 0.4)

Sat, 02/20/2010 - 01:31

The latest edition of Maven: The Complete Reference, Edition 0.4, has been released. This edition updates the Flexmojos chapter to the latest FlexMojos 3.5.0 release and refreshes information about Flexmojos archetypes. We added an initial version of a chapter by Manfred Moser that walks through the process of using Maven to build Android applications. In addition to that we fixed some minor issues throughout the book that had been reported by the community.

A full list of changes in Edition 0.4:

The following contributors provided invaluable feedback and contributions:

 
Categories: Companies

Nexus Scheduled Jobs: Video Walkthrough of Major Features

Thu, 02/18/2010 - 11:00

The following demonstration video was shown in the Sonatype booth at last month’s Jfokus 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden. This video provides a quick walkthrough of the major features in Nexus Scheduled Jobs.

Highlights of this demonstration:

Time (M:SS) Note 0:29 Managing Nexus Scheduled Jobs 0:32 Creating a New Scheduled Job 0:58 Configuring Task Settings 1:23 Job Email Notification 1:32 Configuring a Job’s Schedule 1:32 Configuring a Job’s Schedule 1:55 Manual Execution of a Task 2:15 Available Task Types 2:31 Schedule Recurrence Options 2:45 Scheduling a Job using a CRON Expression 2:59 Monthly Scheduling 3:03 Weekly Scheduling 3:13 Daily Scheduling 3:21 Hourly Scheduling 3:31 Task Type: Scheduled Backups 3:39 Task Type: Scheduled Remote Index Downloads 3:49 Task Type: Emptying the Trash 3:57 Task Type: Evicting Unused Proxy Artifacts 4:05 Task Type: Expiring Repository Caches 4:10 Task Type: Publishing Indexes 4:19 Task Type: Purging Nexus Timeline 4:25 Task Type: Rebuilding Maven Metadata 4:29 Task Type: Reindexing Repositories 4:37 Task Type: Removing Snapshots 4:43 Task Type: Synchronizing Shadow Repository 4:49 Task Type: Mirror an Eclipse Update Site  
Categories: Companies

In other news

Wed, 02/17/2010 - 21:06

Welcome to the roundup of blog posts that mention Nexus, Maven, and other projects that Sonatype developers contribute to.

DevDanke: Create an Executable Jar with Maven
“There are several ways to make an executable jar with Maven. Two popular ways are to use the maven-jar-plugin or use the maven-assembly-plugin. Each has pros and cons.”
By Dan, on February 18, 2009

IBM DeveloperWorks: Build better Web applications with Google Sitebricks: Create a sample Java Web application using Maven, Sitebricks, and Guice
“Sitebricks, which is still in beta, is a new Java™ Web application framework. You might wonder, “Why do I need yet another Web framework?” With Google Sitebricks you can rapidly build a Web application that can be maintained, or worked on, by others. Sitebricks is built on top of Guice. It expands and extends many of the principles of Guice to the Web. Like Guice, it makes aggressive use of annotations to keep configuration as part of the code. You will not have to create or edit a lot of XML files to use Guice. Instead, Sitebricks lets you create Web applications while writing a lot less code. The code you write will be straightforward. You can look at Sitebricks code and quickly understand what’s going on. Sitebricks does not compromise type safety or performance.”
By Michael Galpin, Software architect, eBay, on 16 Feb 2010

Bram’s Braindump:Howto: soapUI integration tests with Maven
“Running soapUI tests with maven is surprisingly easy, all it requires is a few simple steps. This howto will walk you through deploying your web project in an embedded container and running the soapUI tests in the integration test phase.”
By Bram, on 15 February 2010

Java Evangelist John Yeary’s Blog: Introduction to Apache Maven Presentation
“This is an Introduction to Apache Maven presentation that I gave at the Greenville Java Users Group on the 11th of February. It covers the basics of installing and configuring Apache Maven. It also demonstrates creating three projects from relatively simple to a more complex Apache MyFaces and Facelets example. I also demonstrate the power of using the Jetty plugin to deploy and test our application. Finally I create a project site which contains information gathered from the pom.xml and project files including any unit testing.”
By John Yeary, on February 14, 2010

 
Categories: Companies

Nexus System Feeds and Log Files: Video Walkthrough of Major Features

Wed, 02/17/2010 - 11:00

The following demonstration video was displayed in the Sonatype booth at last month’s Jfokus 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden. This video provides a quick walk through of the System Feed and Log file UI available in Nexus.

Hightlights of this video:

Time (M:SS) Note 0:26 Viewing System Feeds 0:37 Browsing System Changes 0:49 Accessing Nexus RSS Feeds 1:03 Viewing Nexus System Files 1:19 Tailing Log Files from the Nexus UI 1:32 Log4J Configuration 1:38 Latest Version Notification Configuration 1:44 Nexus Server Configuration 2:00 PGP Keyserver Configuration 2:08 Procurement Plugin Configuration 2:14 Security Configuration 2:34 Nexus Server configuration as XML  
Categories: Companies