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Maven is a pretty horrible dependency manager. I would take NPM over it any day, because it is so much simpler. There is much less that can go wrong, while with

Maven is a pretty horrible dependency manager. I would take NPM over it any day, because it is so much simpler. There is much less that can go wrong, while with maven you're fighting with the tooling all the time. pom.xml files are much larger than package.json files. While I can read and understand a package.json no problemo in a couple of seconds, with pom.xml files I'm completely lost for hours on end, even when I wrote them myself a while ago.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
maven predates NPM by probably 20 years. We've learned a lot about dependency managers collectively in that time. I'm sure if maven were rewritten today, it would be different.
- yesbabyyes 4y ago
  Six years; 2004 vs 2010.
- kaba0 4y ago
  NPM changed its model (more like fixed) several times during the few years it existed. They hardly learn anything.
Supermancho 4y ago
Why did I include this package B? Oh it addresses a security concern from a dependency of this other package A. Hope you put a comment there. Wait, there's a security issue with B also? Add another package C to deal with the security issue in B. That's just 1 aspect. Now let's munge in plugins and plugins of packages and it gets messy real fast. Outside of the outdated XML, is there a way to deal with these problems cleanly?
lordnacho 4y ago
The problem is also that there's several dependency managers in the ecosystem. You end up learning them all badly because some piece is only available in one or the other.
vollmond 4y ago
I'd say Maven is more than a dependency manager, though. It's a full build manager, with dependency management as one (major) feature. The dependency management part itself isn't very complicated, other than the verbosity of XML as the structure. I have spent a long time as a Java dev using Maven, and the past few years floating around some other projects (C#, PHP, Python, a tiny bit of NodeJS) and continually find myself wishing to have Maven back, so I suppose YMMV.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  Ironically though, every time I start a new project with maven, I end up needing to google how to actually build a runnable thing. I end up needing to configure some kind of maven plugin to build a fat jar.
adrianmsmith 4y ago
> Maven is a pretty horrible dependency manager. I would take NPM over it any day But Maven doesn't need a "lock" file, and can still download a reproducible tree of dependencies just fine, so that's a win in my book!
albertopv 4y ago
Quite the opposite, we had tons of issues with npm/package.json and none whatsoever with maven, which we can use for basically everything and it's super stable from release to another.
kaba0 4y ago
I will literally rather download deps one by one by hand than use npm, it’s that bad.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

maven predates NPM by probably 20 years. We've learned a lot about dependency managers collectively in that time. I'm sure if maven were rewritten today, it would be different.

yesbabyyes 4y ago
Six years; 2004 vs 2010.
kaba0 4y ago
NPM changed its model (more like fixed) several times during the few years it existed. They hardly learn anything.

Supermancho 4y ago

Why did I include this package B? Oh it addresses a security concern from a dependency of this other package A. Hope you put a comment there. Wait, there's a security issue with B also? Add another package C to deal with the security issue in B. That's just 1 aspect. Now let's munge in plugins and plugins of packages and it gets messy real fast. Outside of the outdated XML, is there a way to deal with these problems cleanly?

lordnacho 4y ago

The problem is also that there's several dependency managers in the ecosystem. You end up learning them all badly because some piece is only available in one or the other.

vollmond 4y ago

I'd say Maven is more than a dependency manager, though. It's a full build manager, with dependency management as one (major) feature. The dependency management part itself isn't very complicated, other than the verbosity of XML as the structure. I have spent a long time as a Java dev using Maven, and the past few years floating around some other projects (C#, PHP, Python, a tiny bit of NodeJS) and continually find myself wishing to have Maven back, so I suppose YMMV.

mrkeen 4y ago
Ironically though, every time I start a new project with maven, I end up needing to google how to actually build a runnable thing. I end up needing to configure some kind of maven plugin to build a fat jar.

adrianmsmith 4y ago

> Maven is a pretty horrible dependency manager. I would take NPM over it any day But Maven doesn't need a "lock" file, and can still download a reproducible tree of dependencies just fine, so that's a win in my book!

albertopv 4y ago

Quite the opposite, we had tons of issues with npm/package.json and none whatsoever with maven, which we can use for basically everything and it's super stable from release to another.

kaba0 4y ago

I will literally rather download deps one by one by hand than use npm, it’s that bad.