Hello Eugene, Thank you for the question about Jarvana's purpose.
Jarvana's raison d’être (Jarvana was conceived one August evening in Nice, France) is that I wanted a web-based application that would let me search for classes in the maven repo and get their dependency information. I also wanted to have links to source code and javadocs (if available) and to be able to view these online. Several web-based maven repo search tools exist, but Nexus is the only other online tool that I've seen that offers class searching. Nexus currently doesn't offer viewable souce code and javadoc links (that I'm aware of), and these are things that I find useful when I am trying to figure out what a class does. This capability seemed useful, so I became motivated to share this functionality with the world. Since you mentioned it, I would love to see source code and javadocs via m2eclipse, although I don't know how other people feel. I would especially like it if I could preview source code/javadocs for a class with m2eclipse before deciding to download a jar and use it in my project. Every once in a while I have a need to see what's in an archive file. If there are javadocs, source code, or images in a jar file, I'd prefer to scroll through such content online if I happen to be in a web browser. Although Jarvana does this, class and artifact searching is far more useful to most people than this feature. Jarvana is first and foremost a search engine. Jarvana takes a very hyperlinked/web 1.0 approach to searching. It allows people to search for classes, artifacts, and content. When search results are returned, it tries to link to relevant information (project dependency, source code, javadoc, plugin goals, etc). Web browsers have a lot of limitations, but they are great for hyperlinking. Jarvana was a chance to learn how to write a Java-based search engine (in the process we gained a great respect and appreciation for the work that Doug Cutting and other developers have done on the Lucene project). It seemed that no one had done a really in-depth indexing of the maven repo, so we wrote Jarvana. It's kind of like mapping the human genome. Once you map it, you can do interesting things with it. The Jarvana indexes are huge, but no one besides the Jarvana web app interacts with these indexes, so criticism of the large indexes really doesn't make much sense to me. They are large so we can provide new, intrinsically different search capabilities. We will probably add new interesting types of searches in the future if we find the time and motivation to do so. Many times, I've tried to explain to other developers the benefits of adopting Maven for project management. But some people seem opposed to Maven, and maybe sometimes they have situations that justify that opposition. They are free to adopt other technologies that might be a better fit for them. Likewise, some people might find Jarvana to be a silly little search engine, so they never need to use it, but a few others might find it to be useful. Jarvana isn't the first maven repo search tool and I'm sure it won't be the last. However, I believe that variety is good when it comes to software (operating systems, build tools, search engines, etc), and I think our little search engine is a sign of a growing, healthy maven community. If nothing else, it's been a great learning experience. Keep up the great work with m2eclipse. I really think it is opening up maven to thousands of new developers and making their (and our) lives easier. Take care, Deron Eriksson Eugene Kuleshov wrote: > > Deron, > > I wonder what is the purpose of such application? Being a Maven user for > several ears I never had a need to browse content of some jar classes in > the Maven repository... not outside my ide anyways. > > Also, from what I see, most of the information is already available from > the repository index. Of course index does not include content of the jars > and all the poms, but it still can be used to search trough them and it is > far smaller then 10gb > > Tools like m2eclipse allow to search and open Maven poms directly from > remote repositories. More over it allows to open pom editor from Navigate > / Open Maven pom menu, from Maven Indexes view, from SVN//CVS Repositories > view and even from History view. Then you can see the effective pom or > resolved dependency hierarchy and navigate to other poms. If there is some > interest, we could also show content of attached artifacts right in the > pom editor (e.g. the sources or javadocs) > > regards, > Eugene > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/New-Maven-Respository-Search-Application-tp21973961p22163721.html Sent from the Maven - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
