Denver Dev Blog » Maven

DZone Maven RefCard Released

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:56:08 +0000

I’m very pleased to announce that my DZone Maven RefCard was released this week ahead of schedule, and JavaLobby did a little introductory interview for the launch. A handful of folks contributed to the early alpha reviews and I want to acknowledge their inputs: Ken Sipe, Tim O’Brien, Chris Maki, Tim Berglund, and Jason van Zyl.

The timing was great, as I did a Mastering Maven talk at the San Diego Java Users Group (SDJUG) on Tuesday night. A handful of the attendees came with printed copies of the RefCard in hand!

I’m always looking for ways to contribute to the Maven community, and this was by far the most fun I’ve had building materials to promote this unique Convention over Configuration build tool.

Maven 3.0 Early Access

Matthew McCullough — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:28:55 +0000

Maven 3.0, a mostly-backwards compatible, but significantly improved and extensible version of Maven is developing very quickly. Jason van Zyl hosted a Maven Meetup at their offices in Mountain View in March of this year. Lots of deep information about Maven 2.0 and 3.0 was shared, and videos of some of the sessions are now starting to be posted to the Vimeo web site. The Maven 3.0 video is especially insightful:

Jason van Zyl on Maven 3 from Sonatype on Vimeo.

Here are the takeaway points, highly distilled to 140 proof, for those without time to watch the video:

Improved overarching performance (tools, engine, resolution, downloads, builds)
Better tooling integration
Tie-ins with OSGi
Excellence in Eclipse integration
Possibility of non-XML POMs
Lifecycle extension points
High-performance artifact resolution engine
Documentation-hyperlinked error messages

If you want to get access to the Maven 3.0 code, you can view the list of SVN checkout URLs here (or here for the hardcore Git lovers), or just view the source in your browser here. If you want early access to the binaries, you can download them from Apache.

Maven Unit Tests and Continuous Integration Servers

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:50:20 +0000

If you are running a Continuous Integration server such as Hudson, you’ll want to consider routing your SureFire outputs to the console so that they’ll appear in the build-report logs. If you leave SureFire at its default, it will output each test’s success or failure to an individual test XML and TXT file, but those are likely not in an exposed directory on your CI server. If instead, you route the output to the console, it will get reported in your failure emails that your CI server is capable of sending.

Just pass the useFile=false parameter on the command line or set it in the plugin config section of your pom.xml.

mvn test -Dsurefire.useFile=false

Before:

-------------------------------------------------------
T E S T S
-------------------------------------------------------
Running com.ambientideas.AppTest
Hello World! This is a JUnit test!
Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.045 sec <<< FAILURE!Results :Failed tests:testApp(com.ambientideas.AppTest)Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0

After:

-------------------------------------------------------
T E S T S
-------------------------------------------------------
Running com.ambientideas.AppTest
Hello World! This is a JUnit test!
Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.045 sec <<< FAILURE!
testApp(com.ambientideas.AppTest)  Time elapsed: 0.014 sec  <<< FAILURE!
junit.framework.AssertionFailedError
at junit.framework.Assert.fail(Assert.java:47)
at junit.framework.Assert.assertTrue(Assert.java:20)
at junit.framework.Assert.assertTrue(Assert.java:27)
at com.ambientideas.AppTest.testApp(AppTest.java:37)

Results :Failed tests:testApp(com.ambientideas.AppTest)Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0

Using the Maven Command Line Interface Plugin

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:36:00 +0000

Maven 1.0 users were spoiled with the console plugin, and now Maven 2.0 users can get a nearly equivalent experience with a high-performance bootstrapped prompt via the Command Line Interface plugin. Watch this quick screencast for a tour of using this plugin and start saving even more time with Maven.