Maven has a high learning curve, but once learned it is incredibly simple to use.
That high bar is created by the tool configuration. You can change and hack everything, but you have to understand how Maven works to do so. This generally blocks people from doing really stupid things, because you have to learn how maven works to successfully modify it and in doing so you learn why you shouldn’t.
This is the exact weakness of Gradle, the barrier for modification is far lower and the tool is far less rigid. So you get lots of people who are still learning implement all sorts of weird and terrible practice.
The end result is I can usually dust off someone elses old maven project and it will build immediately using “mvn clean install”, about half the gradle projects I have been brought in on won’t without reverse engineering effort because they have things hard coded all over them. A not small percentage are so mangled they can’t be built without the dev who wrote it’s machine.
Also you really shouldn’t be tinkering with your build pipelines that much. Initial constraints determine the initial solution, then periodically you review them to improve. DevSecOps exists to speed development and ease support it isn’t a goal in of itself
Completely agree. I can jump into any maven project and understand it with ease. Gradle on the other hand requires deep understanding of the build file due to all the flexibility that it offers.
Maven has unit and integration test phases and there are a multitude of plugins designed to hook into those phases but there are constraints by design.
Trying to hook everything into the build management system is a source of technical debt, your using a tool for something it wasn’t designed.
I would look at what makes sense within the build management system and what makes sense in a CI pipeline.
CI tools have different DSL and usually provide a means to manage environments. Certain integration and system level tests are best performed there.
For instance I keep system tests as a seperate managed project. The project can be executed from developer machines for local builds but I also create a small build pipeline to build the project, deploy it and run the system tests against it triggered by pull requests.
This is why I say the build management system doesn’t really change, because you should treat everything as descrete standalone components.
The Parent POM gets updates once every six months, the basic build verification CI pipeline only changes to the latest language release, etc…
Projects which try to embed gitflow into a pom or integrate CD into the gradle file are the unbuildable messes I get asked to fix.
Removed by mod
Maven has a high learning curve, but once learned it is incredibly simple to use.
That high bar is created by the tool configuration. You can change and hack everything, but you have to understand how Maven works to do so. This generally blocks people from doing really stupid things, because you have to learn how maven works to successfully modify it and in doing so you learn why you shouldn’t.
This is the exact weakness of Gradle, the barrier for modification is far lower and the tool is far less rigid. So you get lots of people who are still learning implement all sorts of weird and terrible practice.
The end result is I can usually dust off someone elses old maven project and it will build immediately using “mvn clean install”, about half the gradle projects I have been brought in on won’t without reverse engineering effort because they have things hard coded all over them. A not small percentage are so mangled they can’t be built without the dev who wrote it’s machine.
Also you really shouldn’t be tinkering with your build pipelines that much. Initial constraints determine the initial solution, then periodically you review them to improve. DevSecOps exists to speed development and ease support it isn’t a goal in of itself
Completely agree. I can jump into any maven project and understand it with ease. Gradle on the other hand requires deep understanding of the build file due to all the flexibility that it offers.
Removed by mod
Maven has unit and integration test phases and there are a multitude of plugins designed to hook into those phases but there are constraints by design.
Trying to hook everything into the build management system is a source of technical debt, your using a tool for something it wasn’t designed.
I would look at what makes sense within the build management system and what makes sense in a CI pipeline.
CI tools have different DSL and usually provide a means to manage environments. Certain integration and system level tests are best performed there.
For instance I keep system tests as a seperate managed project. The project can be executed from developer machines for local builds but I also create a small build pipeline to build the project, deploy it and run the system tests against it triggered by pull requests.
This is why I say the build management system doesn’t really change, because you should treat everything as descrete standalone components.
The Parent POM gets updates once every six months, the basic build verification CI pipeline only changes to the latest language release, etc…
Projects which try to embed gitflow into a pom or integrate CD into the gradle file are the unbuildable messes I get asked to fix.
Removed by mod
Boom roasted
🍿