The last week or so I have been developing a new version of the http://ehcache.sf.net project web site with Maven 2.0.
Why? The old site featured a couple of toilet roll web pages, the longest of which was 2026 lines. That’s a long toilet roll. With the upcoming release of 1.2 and a lot more features to write about, something had to give. I knew I wanted a nice side nav bar and to provide some extra info about the project over what I had been doing. I thought about doing all the redesign by hand or moving the site to confluence, which I have an open source license for. But I am lazy.
I met the guys from Maven 2.0 in Portland at last year’s OSCON and I knew that Mergere was paying about 8 guys to work on Maven 2.0 full time. So I went to take a look at what they were up to. It looked like there was a lot of stuff you get free out of the box.
A week later and the site is done. I think it is a big improvement over what was there, and I think Maven 2.0 ended up being a pretty good choice to to it. From here on it will be very easy to maintain.
So, what did I think?
The Good
- APT, Maven 2’s simple documentation adopted tag language, is simple with a very easy to learn syntax and high productivity.
- You can call into Ant for stuff that Maven does not do. Nice.
- Tons and tons of great reports and site output that are generated from your pom.xml or with a little plugin setup.
- The #maven channel at irc.codehaus.org. Thanks guys!
The Bad
- APT is limited. No superscripts. Difficult to combine multiple things or it gets confused.
- Maven is hard to get into.
- Very poor documentation. I logged a few bugs on this. Unless the maven guys want to keep getting bugged on IRC they need to write more and better doco.
- Maven 2 has a lot less plugins than Maven 1.
The Ugly
- Doxia barfs on APT when you have a tag mismatch with an error like “missing ‘>'”. Try finding that in a 500 line document with no line number indicated.
- A general lack of useful error messages which pinpoint what is really going on. SCM and Clover plugins are partiularly bad.
- MOJO properties don’t seem to have a standard naming convention. I got caught up with seemingly random variations around the_tag, theTag and thetag.
Where to now? I am not yet building ehcache on Maven. I did restructure the code to follow the Maven directory structure. The Ant build works very well however and I am wary about how much time it will take to get everything working. Maybe version 2.1.
Would I recommend it? If you like the new ehcache site, you can get the same thing for your own project , using ehcache as an example, in no time. But if you do. copy the ehcache pom.xml. Those 424 lines of config were hard won.
