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Personally, I wouldn't recommend Maven to beginners. I would recommend beginners to learn Maven as it is one of the de-facto standards in JVM dependency managem

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Maven to beginners. I would recommend beginners to learn Maven as it is one of the de-facto standards in JVM dependency management, but the documentation is highly confusing and the learning curve is very steep. Beginners will likely struggle with Maven concepts.

lmm 6y ago
I very much disagree; the only people I've known to have trouble with Maven are experienced developers who expected their build tool to work in a very specific way (i.e. that they would define a bunch of commands for it to execute and tell it what to do). For a beginner who comes to it with no preconceptions, maven is very easy: you fill in the parts your XML editor tells you to, list your dependencies, and then run one of their short list of phases for what you want to do: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html#a-build-lifecycle-is-made-up-of-phases https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... . What could be simpler?
- JackFr 6y ago
  The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’? And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’? And how is it that none of the ‘dependency’ goals can tell me the origin of the version - I have to use ‘help:effectivePom’? Maven is powerful and people forget how innovative it was. But it’s not easy.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’? The page I linked to is pretty clear about which is which and what they do. > And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’? You list your dependencies in dependencies, you manage them in dependencyManagement. But it's clear in the documentation, and if you're looking at a tutorial from 10 years ago then it'll still be accurate. There are confusing things in maven. But documentation and backward-compatibility go a long way, and I really think the fixed build lifecycle puts it head and shoulders above a lot of alternatives; the cost/benefit of each project having a slightly different set of build commands just doesn't stack up.

lmm 6y ago

I very much disagree; the only people I've known to have trouble with Maven are experienced developers who expected their build tool to work in a very specific way (i.e. that they would define a bunch of commands for it to execute and tell it what to do). For a beginner who comes to it with no preconceptions, maven is very easy: you fill in the parts your XML editor tells you to, list your dependencies, and then run one of their short list of phases for what you want to do: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html#a-build-lifecycle-is-made-up-of-phases https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... . What could be simpler?

JackFr 6y ago
The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’? And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’? And how is it that none of the ‘dependency’ goals can tell me the origin of the version - I have to use ‘help:effectivePom’? Maven is powerful and people forget how innovative it was. But it’s not easy.
- lmm 6y ago
  > The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’? The page I linked to is pretty clear about which is which and what they do. > And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’? You list your dependencies in dependencies, you manage them in dependencyManagement. But it's clear in the documentation, and if you're looking at a tutorial from 10 years ago then it'll still be accurate. There are confusing things in maven. But documentation and backward-compatibility go a long way, and I really think the fixed build lifecycle puts it head and shoulders above a lot of alternatives; the cost/benefit of each project having a slightly different set of build commands just doesn't stack up.