Maven

God I hate maven.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, either.

Let me count the ways.

1. The syntax is verbose, obfuscated and generally horrible.
2. It’s incredibly slow and inefficient
3. The IDE integration is incredibly slow and inefficient
4. The maven release process
5. There appears to be no minimum standard for artifacts uploaded to the central repository
6. Naming conventions are stuffed
7. Dependency tracking is stuffed
8. Reinvention of URLs (and I’m thinking of the scm element here), ‘wagons’, ‘mojos’, ‘goals’ and any other concept that they feel deserves new terminology.
9. The 50 or so mvn component JARs it downloads the first time you run it.

The only thing it’s got going for it is the central repository, and the possibility of storing project metadata is a standardised way. The rest of it is pure unadulterated poo.

At any rate, this is just a short entry to make up for the fact that I haven’t updated this blog since April.

Later on I might write a stanza on each of the points above, but I was just doing a bit of hacking and rediscovered my loathing of this thing and needed to vent.

It does work, I suppose. Eventually.

It could be worse. I could be trying to GNU autoconf this thing.

Anyway I promise I’ll write something vaguely constructive the next time I update this site.