As requested here is a proposal to move to Maven. 2011/12/17 Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org>
> > Using Maven has several benefits (standardization of structure, lots of > > reusable plugins, supported by major IDEs), > > Those are features, not benefits. > The standardization of structure is not a feature, but a constraint. When you use Maven *the right way* you ought to follow a well standardized structure. > You are, of course, free to take a look at this. It might be more > productive to try and make the case for Maven before doing that work Ok, let's do it again :-D 1. Standardization. Maven strongly encourages to use a standardized structure. The source should go into src/main/java, the resources in src/main/resources etc. You can change it, but this is discouraged. With Ant you always do things differently for different projects. 2. Modularization. Separation between modules is strong, i.e. one jar-one source directory. In the case of Tomcat, there is a big big trouble: one single big source directory. Separating them will be one of the most important step to do. 3. Metadata-driven process. The build process is driven by metadata (where the source is? where should I deploy it?) and not by commands (compile the source that is in that point, deploy it in that repository) 4. POMs are (almost) universal. Projects of the same kind have almost the same content.. 5. Plug-ins do generically what pieces of Ant's script do specifically. For example take the Maven assembly plugin: via a descriptor you obtain a zip file to distribute. 6. When all the metadata is in place, the release process is a matter of launching: mvn release:prepare and mvn release:perform Antonio
