Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Mavenising

I just realised again how great Maven is. I wanted to get back to working on JSimpleton, the bot that allows forum users to play old text adventure games cooperatively. I haven't touched the project for months and since I last did have gotten a new computer and didn't have any of the numerous Jakarta and other open source libraries any more, and have switched Eclipse versions from 3.0.1 to 3.1. Thankfully I had used Maven as my build tool and Eclipse as my IDE. After importing the old project directories into Eclipse, installing and configuring Maven and the Eclipse Mevenide (Maven IDE -- why Mevenide?) plugin from the update site, I only had to run the POM synchronization and build the project with Maven once to have all my classpath dependencies in the IDE resolved and the project built properly. Ok, so there were more issues than that, but they were my fault entirely.

Sometimes I don't think Maven is that great though -- I've wasted many an hour trying to make it build complex J2EE projects exactly how I want. Maybe I'm just not used to it.