"The only thing your IDE actually needs to get from the Maven POM is to understand where your source code is, what you depend on and where it is, and how to run your tests."
And how does it get that from ant? That seems such a small thing. "Everything else they do...." must be so important. I don't think it is. I think the most important thing is that when developing in the IDE I have a reasonable certainty that when it builds on the CI server that its going to do the same thing. The next most important thing is that our team can develop using the IDE each prefers (or vim if they want). Maven is the only "project description" that is understood by every IDE and also runs from the command line.
"Everything else they do with command line calls, just like Ant".
Not so. For example, both eclipse and IntelliJ, when faced with a merge-war project, will set up a project definition that provides the same behavior as running maven, but without running maven. Modifying a resource in the common war project causes that file to be deployed to any running targets. Its instantaneous and automatic. Its the difference between an Integrated Development Environment and a text editor.
Everything else, don't use maven. Maven is a tool for building java.
Our tools for deployment make maven look like "hello world". I wouldn't use maven to deploy. Likewise for submitting code to anything. I use maven to build deployable targets from java and to upload them to a repo. End of story.
Basically, if it hurts when you do that, don't do that. I use bash on my build server. Somewhere in the middle, bash runs maven.
So how would I handle generating some code from another format? Depends what it is. One fellow said reading from a database for example. Well before I ran maven, I'd run the program that generated the java files, and then I'd check those files into source control so that we know what exactly got built. Then I'd run maven. If it was generating java from a text file, I'd probably have it as an Ant task in my IDE, and whatever got generated, I'd check that in too. Sometimes I've gone as far as to write an IDE plugin that builds the file automatically.
Checking in generated files? Isn't that an excuse? Well, no, not if you want to guarantee to be able to build it in 18 months time. I've worked at a place where they couldn't even build an 18 month old product to support a customer because the build system itself wasn't versioned!
And how does it get that from ant? That seems such a small thing. "Everything else they do...." must be so important. I don't think it is. I think the most important thing is that when developing in the IDE I have a reasonable certainty that when it builds on the CI server that its going to do the same thing. The next most important thing is that our team can develop using the IDE each prefers (or vim if they want). Maven is the only "project description" that is understood by every IDE and also runs from the command line.
"Everything else they do with command line calls, just like Ant".
Not so. For example, both eclipse and IntelliJ, when faced with a merge-war project, will set up a project definition that provides the same behavior as running maven, but without running maven. Modifying a resource in the common war project causes that file to be deployed to any running targets. Its instantaneous and automatic. Its the difference between an Integrated Development Environment and a text editor.
Everything else, don't use maven. Maven is a tool for building java.
Our tools for deployment make maven look like "hello world". I wouldn't use maven to deploy. Likewise for submitting code to anything. I use maven to build deployable targets from java and to upload them to a repo. End of story.
Basically, if it hurts when you do that, don't do that. I use bash on my build server. Somewhere in the middle, bash runs maven.
So how would I handle generating some code from another format? Depends what it is. One fellow said reading from a database for example. Well before I ran maven, I'd run the program that generated the java files, and then I'd check those files into source control so that we know what exactly got built. Then I'd run maven. If it was generating java from a text file, I'd probably have it as an Ant task in my IDE, and whatever got generated, I'd check that in too. Sometimes I've gone as far as to write an IDE plugin that builds the file automatically.
Checking in generated files? Isn't that an excuse? Well, no, not if you want to guarantee to be able to build it in 18 months time. I've worked at a place where they couldn't even build an 18 month old product to support a customer because the build system itself wasn't versioned!