To build on this and give a concrete upgrade path that I've used:
When a company I was with first tried Maven2, we had several projects with a
common dependency. Each project and the dependency were built with Ant.
* First, we wrote a pom for the common project that included all of its
dependencies, and pulled them into a local lib directory using Maven Antlib.
* Next we made it install the jar to the local repo using
install:install-file.
* Then we did the same for the dependent projects, write a POM and make it
pull dependencies local with Antlib.
* Then the shared library went fully Maven,
* Followed by the dependent projects several months later.
Antlib was really the key to a successful, gradual migration.
Harlan
On 10/12/07, Graham Leggett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, October 12, 2007 3:31 am, Wayne Fay wrote:
>
> > If you are truly "converting" from Ant to Maven, the correct approach
> > would be to "convert" the application structure into the suggested
> > Maven layout.
> >
> > You should be able to do this in a branch in your SCM so as to not
> > disturb the rest of your team until you are ready to finalize your
> > changes.
>
> Having done this conversion on a large project in the past year, in
> practise the full conversion to maven took a very long time, so this
> strategy may not work.
>
> If you are not experienced in maven already, the best thing to do is to
> take baby steps.
>
> Get the most simplest part of your project (the jars) building cleanly
> with maven, and use this as a testing ground to get you familiar with the
> maven build process. Do this on the existing sources if you can, by
> dropping in pom.xml into the root of each jar as necessary. It will
> probably become apparent as you go on that some of your code needs to be
> restructured. Do this as necessary, updating your ant build as you go
> along to keep everything working.
>
> Sometimes, you may find that an ant build produces more than one artifact,
> such as an EJB, and then an EAR file. What we did was to create new
> projects alongside the EJB project, which only built the EAR file (This
> project contained a pom.xml file and nothing else).
>
> Eventually we were ready to wean people off the ant build and get things
> going with maven only, and the conversion has worked very well.
>
> The prize at the end of all this work is worth it: All our code is built
> and tested using continuous integration, with no platform or machine
> specific build setups (we had hard coded paths *everywhere*).
>
> A release is tested, tagged, and built from the pristine tag (no more
> releases from working copies) start to finish within 30 minutes ("Help! We
> need to get this bugfix into UAT as soon as possible!", "No problem".),
> and we now have the *exact* source code used to create a production
> release ("Help! We need to replicate this production problem in a
> development environment!", "No problem").
>
> The docs are all auto-built and auto-deployed ("Help! We need to cook up a
> plan to make javadocs available, which will be very difficult!", "Already
> done, here is the URL").
>
> Regards,
> Graham
> --
>
>
>
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--
Harlan Iverson
http://blog.devspan.com
