Maven Makes Developers Feel Stupid
Although Maven has its benefits, its documentation is often spartan and scattered, and sometimes it can be quite painful to figure out how to accomplish a task, although once you've figured out how to do it, it's usually not terrifically hard to repeat it in the future.
A recent post to the Maven list just classically typifies this, for me: "How to use EAR plugin? Am I stupid?" Yes, sometimes Maven makes you feel stupid. I'm inclined to believe that's often Maven's fault, not the developer's.
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4 comments:
Followed up directly by another user stating: "It is really very easy, you add the artifacts you want to include in the EAR as dependencies to the pom.xml. "Modules" refers not to Maven modules, but to the WARs and EJB-JARs that are included in the EAR."
Well, Maven 2 is really not easy to learn but easy to use then. As for me, I love to start project from Maven 2 Archetypes. BTW, I had no problems with EARs+Maven2. It is tricky a little but it's not rocket science.
Stas:
I'd agree partially -- Maven is quite capable, and once you know how to accomplish a task, it's not usually that hard to repeat, but learning how to make it happen for the first time is often rather painful. I'm not entirely certain I'd call that "easy to use", but that's a judgement call.
"the apache maven project":
It's true, although [1] the docs on the ear plugin are pretty spartan and [2] most Maven users I know would recognize this feeling.
There are lots of reasons for this -- the plugin system means you have to know where you're looking, and sometimes that's not obvious (e.g. assembly plugin vs. shade plugin), the docs for each plugin are spartan at best and sometimes nearly useless.
I use Maven daily, but it certainly has its warts.
Preventing Maven from ever having been conceived is the best rationale I've heard for building a time machine.
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