[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss Portal] - Re: Portal build

[pgier]

I think eventually, we will want to switch to maven, so that there is consistency between the jboss projects/products, builds are easier to understand/maintain, and more features are available.

The approach that I've been taking with other projects, is to add the maven build scripts (pom.xml) along side the ant build.  This way either one can be used during a transitional period, until people are basically happy with the maven build.

I don't think the complaints that I've heard are serious enough to stop the migration to maven.  The main complaints about maven that people have seem to be: 

Lack of flexibility - Maven forces your project to follow certain conventions, which can be difficult for larger projects.  These issues can normally be handled by restructuring certain parts of the project, or creating new plugins, or just finding the right plugin/configuration to use.
Lack of IDE integration - IDE integration exists for Eclipse and IDEA.  It's not perfect, but it's getting better, and with a little research/configuration most things can be done.
Bugs/Lack of Docs - Again Maven works pretty well for basic stuff, but with more complex configuration, finding bugs is not uncommon.  You can either create a codehaus jira issue, or create an issue under JBBUILD, and I can try to fix it.

I haven't really looked at migrating the portal build yet.  I'm currently working on aop and the app server and probably won't get to portal for a couple of months.  If someone wants to start working on it, you can try creating some basic pom.xml files that just list the dependencies, and compile the code.  You can look at the microcontainer build as an example.

There are also maven ant tasks (http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks.html) which allow you to use maven's dependency management and some other features from within an ant build script.  This can be useful during the transition, but is probably not a good long term solution.


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