4 ms·

Could you give examples of some of the difficulties people experience using maven to someone who is not a Java veteran?

ddalex 10y ago
Basically, when something goes wrong, it offers no help in what went wrong. It's a nice idea with a terrible implementation.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Also, a lot of things that were trivial before will now have a long series of dependencies.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Heh. To each their own. I prefer having my dependencies listed in version control, automatically downloaded, having a tool that can tell me why dependency x is pulled in etc etc.
    - pawadu 10y ago
      Sure, this is all fine when things work correctly. So far, I actually agree with you. But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar files and copied them to libs/ manually. I think people (in general and not only limited to software development) should strive to minimize dependencies. Otherwise things like this can happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        > But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar files and copied them to libs/ manually. Can't you just check the difference between the last working and the first broken one? If necessary just unpack the last working jar/zip/war side-by-side the first broken and diff them. > I think people (in general and not only limited to software development) should strive to minimize dependencies. Here we totally agree. When I started at my current place we had a mix of spring, javaee, hibernate and whatnot. The size is currently down by almost 70% although a lot of that was also unused resources. My goal is just using javaee + a couple of utilities.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Never put an effort into learning it, never had a problem that wasn't fixed without poking in the source. Not saying others doesn't have problems though, just offering my perspective. (By the way Netbeans can happily use .pom as project file format which means one less thing to go wrong. This saves me some time which comes in handy everytime I have to debug my colleagues IntelliJ setup :-P)
jsight 10y ago
The more that you have to integrate with it, the more that you learn its lifecycle is extremely limited and poorly documented. The syntax for adding and configuring plugins is a horrible nightmare, as is the plugin API itself. Their attitude towards public vs private APIs causes a lot of pain during version upgrades of both the core platform and associated plugins. Basically, it is the worst Java build system in the world, except for all the others.

Basically, when something goes wrong, it offers no help in what went wrong. It's a nice idea with a terrible implementation.

pawadu 10y ago
Also, a lot of things that were trivial before will now have a long series of dependencies.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Heh. To each their own. I prefer having my dependencies listed in version control, automatically downloaded, having a tool that can tell me why dependency x is pulled in etc etc.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    Sure, this is all fine when things work correctly. So far, I actually agree with you. But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar files and copied them to libs/ manually. I think people (in general and not only limited to software development) should strive to minimize dependencies. Otherwise things like this can happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      > But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar files and copied them to libs/ manually. Can't you just check the difference between the last working and the first broken one? If necessary just unpack the last working jar/zip/war side-by-side the first broken and diff them. > I think people (in general and not only limited to software development) should strive to minimize dependencies. Here we totally agree. When I started at my current place we had a mix of spring, javaee, hibernate and whatnot. The size is currently down by almost 70% although a lot of that was also unused resources. My goal is just using javaee + a couple of utilities.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
reitanqild 10y ago
Never put an effort into learning it, never had a problem that wasn't fixed without poking in the source. Not saying others doesn't have problems though, just offering my perspective. (By the way Netbeans can happily use .pom as project file format which means one less thing to go wrong. This saves me some time which comes in handy everytime I have to debug my colleagues IntelliJ setup :-P)

jsight 10y ago

The more that you have to integrate with it, the more that you learn its lifecycle is extremely limited and poorly documented. The syntax for adding and configuring plugins is a horrible nightmare, as is the plugin API itself. Their attitude towards public vs private APIs causes a lot of pain during version upgrades of both the core platform and associated plugins. Basically, it is the worst Java build system in the world, except for all the others.