> I don't see what a dependency management mechanism gets me over
> this. What work does it save me? How much does it cost in terms of
> my time fiddling with it?
Costs:
In my experience so far, the cost is less then what you're doing now
or at least the same. You're already doing a lot of fiddling with
jars, classpaths, special frameworks, etc. Maven automates a huge
chunk of this. The cool thing really is that when you tell maven your
project needs such and such library, you're mostly done. You don't
have to tell it again to java, again to Eclipse, again to the
packaging tool, etc.
What it saves you:
1. For commonly used jars, like apache-commons-logging and such,
maven automates grabbing the damn thing. Sure, each one is only 10 web
page clicks, but 10 jars later...
2. For a work group, using uncommon jars, you can setup a repository
on any webserver so that everyone in your workgroup can find it.
Henrique wants to do this for Wonder, so then all the myriad jars you
need for Wonder will be in one spot. For a specific example, ERCaching
in Wonder uses spy.jar which is particular to a particular to Dustin
Sailings: http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/spyjar/. Note that
Dustin has setup a maven repository.
Now sure, you can do the same thing on a file server, or check them
into svn, or whatever. But that's not automatic, and its not dynamic
based on which frameworks out of Wonder you're using.
3. Ok, so you know you need foo.jar, but what you didn't know is
that it needs bar.jar. Maven can pull bar.jar in automatically.
4. You can get control. Lets say Wonder has commons-
logging-1.03.jar. Listed as a dependency. You can specify in a higher
level pom that you want to use 1.1.1 instead.
5. http://continuum.apache.org/ (though this works with Ant as
well, but with maven, if you say, oh, I want the new version of X, the
build will still work)
Live Demo: http://vmbuild.apache.org/continuum/groupSummary.action
6. For you, since you like to integrate everything, maven can pull
everything you need, and only what you need into the build.
Pierce
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