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0 pointsBossingAround5y ago0 comments

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Maven to beginners. I would recommend beginners to learn Maven as it is one of the de-facto standards in JVM dependency management, but the documentation is highly confusing and the learning curve is very steep. Beginners will likely struggle with Maven concepts.

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lmm5y ago· 2 in thread

I very much disagree; the only people I've known to have trouble with Maven are experienced developers who expected their build tool to work in a very specific way (i.e. that they would define a bunch of commands for it to execute and tell it what to do). For a beginner who comes to it with no preconceptions, maven is very easy: you fill in the parts your XML editor tells you to, list your dependencies, and then run one of their short list of phases for what you want to do: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... . What could be simpler?

JackFr5y ago

The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’? And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’? And how is it that none of the ‘dependency’ goals can tell me the origin of the version - I have to use ‘help:effectivePom’?

Maven is powerful and people forget how innovative it was. But it’s not easy.

lmm5y ago

> The things I want to do, are they ‘goals’, ‘tasks’, ‘phases’ or ‘executions’?

The page I linked to is pretty clear about which is which and what they do.

> And do I manage my dependencies in ‘dependencies’ or ‘dependencyManagement’?

You list your dependencies in dependencies, you manage them in dependencyManagement. But it's clear in the documentation, and if you're looking at a tutorial from 10 years ago then it'll still be accurate.

There are confusing things in maven. But documentation and backward-compatibility go a long way, and I really think the fixed build lifecycle puts it head and shoulders above a lot of alternatives; the cost/benefit of each project having a slightly different set of build commands just doesn't stack up.

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