Apache Maven vs. Apache Ant

For doing software builds in the Java world… most people use either Ant or Maven.  I’ve used both…

From a requirements perspective I need a continuous integration/build process that can do the following:

• Dependency Management – In one place identify the components and their versions that are included in this project.  Ideally the same dependency management system can deal with child dependencies automatically.
• Support some form of reuse across the components (in terms of the build scripts, ideally there’s no large scripts that have redundant text across the commands, difficult to maintain/keep consistent)
• Support for hierarchical projects composed of numerous components (must scale and allow complexity).
• Allow quick builds (most perform)
• Ideally create a project Web site (documentation)
• At least create project reports per component.

I started in the Ant world, i.e. oodles of ANT scripts on big projects.  My main issue was the complexity of the ANT scripts after awhile and the lack of reuse when you had a multi-component.  But it was fast and it could do anything, i.e. powerful.  I experimented on/off with Maven over the years.  Finally got it working this year.  Everything as advertised except really slow when there’s an Internet connection (and just slow in general).  And needed to break large projects up and build them separately (or them crash early, i.e. PermSpace errors).  With command lines like the following:

MAVEN_OPTS “-Xms128m -Xmx640m -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=3600000 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:MaxPermSize=640m -Xverify:none”

It didn’t crash on the mini-builds… but when trying to build everything it would just slow down and ultimately lock the machine.  I was really attracted to the Development Web site that was created with mvn site but if the system can’t perform nor scale… it’s not worth it.  Looking at Seam and Hibernate.. they appear to get by just fine.  And then there’s trying to get the JBOSS Embedded Server running in Maven…  I’ve searched alot/experimented and just not sure what I’m missing there.  Time to thrown in the towel.  So now I’m going to move back to Ant.  In the past few years… it appears as though Ivy has caught on so perhaps Dependency Management.  Appears to be some templating/reuse concepts (although that may have been there awhile and I overlooked it).  Not sure how much can be templated so will be interested to investigate.

So in retrospect… Maven is nice for small projects.  Mine appears massive (i.e. many components, a lot of code generation, etc.).  So time to go back to Apache Ant.  Also need to get a wiki like http://www.SeamFramework.org and http://in.relation.to (i.e. the documentation posted to Al Gore’s Internet).