Maven meetup report

A few days late, here’s a quick report on what I managed to do this Monday here at the ApacheCon EU. As mentioned earlier, I arrived at the conference hotel on Monday evening and headed straight for the Maven meetup.

Maven meetup

The meetup was already in progress when I arrived, but I managed to catch a part of a presentation about the Eclipse integration that just keeps getting better. Nowadays it’s so easy to import and manage Maven projects in Eclipse, that I get really annoyed every time I need to do manually set things up for projects with Ant builds.

Other interesting topics covered were Maven archetypes and the release plugin. I’ve for a long time been thinking about doing some archetypes to help setting up new JCR client applications. We should probably also do something similar for setting up new Sling bundles.

The release plugin demo was interesting, though I’m not so sure if I agree with all the conventions and assumptions that the plugin makes. On a related note, we should configure the GPG plugin for the Maven build in Jackrabbit.

We talked a bit about Maven 2.1.0 and the upcoming 3.0 release.  I’m already pretty happy with the recent Maven 2.0.x releases, so we’ll probably take a while before upgrading, but it’s good to hear that things are progressing on multiple fronts. We also briefly touched on the differences between the Maven and OSGi dependency models and the ways to better bridge the two worlds.

In summary the meetup was really interesting and served well in giving me a better idea of what’s up in the Maven land. Thanks for everyone involved!

Chops, ribs and beer

After the meetup a few of us headed out to Amsterdam city center for some food and drinks. Monday evening wasn’t perhaps the best time to go out as we needed to wander around looking for places that would be open long enough. Anyway, we found some “interesting” places to visit before returning to the hotel in the early hours. Good times.