Trying Maven

I have never used maven in a project I'm working on - mostly because I disliked the rigidity and 'we know better   than you what you need and want'.

Today I wanted to make it a bit easier to build tomcat-lite - and decided to add a maven option. Tomcat-lite is far simpler than tomcat - it may work. I even accepted moving few files around - I couldn't get myself to create the ugly, deep hierarchy - but it seems you can specify 'sourceDirectory' and include resources from the java tree.

Results: I could build the connector and servlets just fine, downloading the deps was nicer than the custom ant tasks that tomcat uses. The main engine - which depends on some files from main tomcat -  it looks like no luck.

I found no way to specify exclude patterns on sources, and using a pre-generated jar file is a mess - you must import it in the repository, far from easy or automated. And all the syntax I had to use took a lot of effort to find and tweak - documentation is certainly not targeted to how to make maven work the way you need, but to make you work in whatever way is easier for maven.

Conclusion: Apache-Ivy does the download better - and has a nice task to copy the jars in a lib, and integrates quite nicely with ant. It is even easy to download Ivy and get it to download the rest. Far easier than Maven - and I just used the same pom.xml I was using for maven.

I'll let the pom files around, in case someone wants to use them - but I will continue to avoid maven and projects that only build with maven.