(3423) Migrate to Apache Maven

Technical short talk 20 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 11:30 - 11:50, Arena 6

• Micha Kiener - mimacom ag (speaker)
• Werner Müller - mimacom ag (co-speaker)

Topics

• Software engineering lifecycle
• Real-world experiences and show cases

Download the presentation

Abstract

Starting with the typical variety of ant scripts the wheel is reinvented on a 
per project ba-sis. Without a strong consistency and no real dependency control 
the same tasks are re-peated over and over again. Moving a developer from one 
project to another often goes with a full day of build introduction.

In this situation the goal should be to move from similar but customized ant 
scripts to a reusable and company wide build infrastructure that is more 
manageable and intuitive.

The session will describe the steps taken to get from CVS / Ant to Subversion / 
Maven. We will describe the necessary infrastructure, its benefits and 
recommendations on its struc-ture. Then the actual steps are shown which where 
made to migrate a multi-module framework to maven.

From there we will show how cutting a release is done and how additional 
projects can then rely on the modules or each other. This will introduce a life 
cycle management that is not included with Ant.

Builds based on maven have a strongly improved dependency control and dependency 
management. Such an infrastructure allows a better structured configuration 
management. In addition the ability to cut stable and reproducible releases is 
delivered for free.

We will present the lessons learned, describe some pitfalls and give hints and 
recommenda-tions that should help planning a migration. Both configuration 
managers and developers will be shown what working with maven looks like.

The session will show the use of maven for product life cycle management that 
will overall improve software quality.