Time To Ditch Ant(iquated build system)?

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with Maven, but Maven 3 is the way to roll for any Java project, enterprise or otherwise. I'd be willing to do some/all of the work migrating from ant to maven if you guys are up for it. Some advantages:

1) No binaries in your repo, adios lib dir
2) Repeatable and predictable builds
3) Sophisticated release management
4) Automated documentation and code review/metrics (don't be scared, it's a good thing)
5) Industry standard, anyone can walk up and just use it

Disadvantages:

1) Someone has to do the move
2) The move involves directory layout change
3) Some people are old fashioned and die-hard ant fans (they'll live)
4) Possibly teething troubles esp around cross platform builds, though it will likely make that easier, not harder.

Let me know what you guys think!

Fred.

dschultz · **Posted:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:51 am

If you wish to propose the changes I can look at updating the repository.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

This one is definitely in the back seat to the git one in my eyes. It's worthwhile anyway, but even better if making the change while already migrated to Git. Let's see how we get on in the other thread first. This one is also quite a bit more work overall.

If/when it goes ahead, though, I have a proper nexus server setup somewhere for deploying artifacts to, but I think it's offline right now. You/we could use that once migrated, if you wanted to. It should be up again fairly soon, with some luck.

Fred.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

My nexus server is back online and with a shiny new (shorter) URL. Looking forward to participating in the next RR release somehow :-)

Dale, did you get a chance to have a play with mvn on that other project to get a feel for it?

dschultz · **Posted:** Mon Apr 30, 2012 10:38 am

I loaded up maven last night and got my environment variables setup as suggested from their site. BUT, when I run mvn --version it spits out some stupid crap about my Java Home being C:\yaddayadda\jre which is wrong.
I'm not sure why it thinks that, as my JAVA_HOME is set correctly to my JDK install and my PATH is set to JAVA_HOME\bin
So needless to say my attempted maven build failed and it was late so I called it a night.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

Well that sucks! Can you post more detail? Or are you happy figuring out the issue? I've put maven on countless win XP and Linux machines and not had any weirdness like that. Is it Vista or 7? Does searching yield any clues? User env vars set or global? Not that I can see why that would have any effect, but worth asking I guess. Good luck! :-)

dschultz · **Posted:** Mon Apr 30, 2012 5:55 pm

I did get it to build from within Eclipse after fiddling with Window->Preferences->Java->Installed JREs and making sure my JDK path was set "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_16"

This is what my system says:

Code:

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>echo %JAVA_HOME%
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_16

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>echo %M2_HOME%
C:\Program Files\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.4

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>echo %M2%
C:\Program Files\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.4\bin

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>echo %PATH%
C:\Program Files\Subversion Client;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin;C:\Program Files\MySQL\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\DivX Shared\;C:\Program Files\GtkSharp\2.12\bin;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_16\bin;C:\Program Files\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.4\bin

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 03:44:56-0500)
Maven home: C:\Program Files\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.6.0_16, vendor: Sun Microsystems Inc.
Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_16\jre
Default locale: en_CA, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows xp", version: "5.1", arch: "x86", family: "windows"
C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>javac -version
javac 1.6.0_16

C:\Documents and Settings\Dale\OpenLogViewer>mvn
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building OpenLogViewer 0.0.3-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

<... snip ...>

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 11.734s
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Apr 30 17:50:34 EDT 2012
[INFO] Final Memory: 14M/254M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Building within Eclipse I get this error, I suspect I need to install a library somewhere on my system?

Code:

SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: Defaulting to no-operation (NOP) logger implementation
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.

I didn't see it in the command line maven build though.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

You likely need to enable the maven-ness of it in eclipse. Maven generates the classpath and without that eclipse can't find the library which lives in your .m2 directory far away. What you're doing in eclipse is likely just a std Java build unaware that it's a maven project and thus unaware that there is a library required and where that lib is. Hopefully that makes sense :-)

dschultz · **Posted:** Mon Apr 30, 2012 11:12 pm

In Eclipse I right click on pod.xml and select Maven build...

Here's the debug log (line 88 and near the very end).

Attachment:

log.txt

It also happened on the subsequent maven clean.

I see Eclipse is busy updating something called nexus maven repository index. We'll see what happens when that's done.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

Does it work correctly on the command line? Thought: how up to date is your eclipse?

Try switching it to use external maven, I don't know what I have setup, but I never run builds in eclipse. Can check later for you, though I suspect that this'll help.

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.id ... .user/7697

dschultz · **Posted:** Tue May 01, 2012 9:48 am

I'll have to recheck a command line build.
I'm using the latest Eclipse version.

As per this: http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder
Where is the referenced jar located (in the repository or elsewhere) and what's making this reference? Is it maven or actually part of OpenLogViewer?

dschultz · **Posted:** Tue May 01, 2012 10:01 am

Another odd thing. I tried it on a clean install on my Win7 x64 system (running 32 bit Java).
I used Eclipse import to pull from the repository on GitHub. Ran the maven build from within Eclipse (saw the error for SLF4J on build and clean as before) got the OpenLogViewer window, all seems to execute fine.

Then I did a clean and tried to build it again and I'm back to square one:

Code:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:2.3.2:compile (default-compile) on project OpenLogViewer: Compilation failure
[ERROR] Unable to locate the Javac Compiler in:
[ERROR] C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\..\lib\tools.jar

Something in the maven clean destroys the environment in which the build was successful the first time round.

These are the kind of problems I hate...

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

Did you try what I suggested, though? Switch eclipse to use the real maven instead of it's built in one. It seems to be a bug in the embedded eclipse variant.

I think we need another call to explain classpaths in more detail?

Weird about working and then not.

Fred.

dschultz · **Posted:** Tue May 01, 2012 1:07 pm

On my Win7 machine I have no external maven installation, the fewer external tools then better as it just makes the whole environment harder to setup.

In Eclipse there's a background process running and it takes about an hour to complete (slow repository?) and it's updating something local nexus maven repository index. I believe once that is complete then a pure Eclipse embedded build works fine with no errors or warnings. There seems to be a huge reliance on this maven repository index (61MB) http://repo1.maven.org/maven2.
Each time I open Eclipse it wants to download that 61MB index for update.

Fearless · **Joined:** Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:44 am **Posts:** 385

Turn it off, I don't use it. I don't even know what it does, TBH.

It's up to you what you do or don't do, but an mvn install is pretty painless regardless of platform. Just drop it in the right place, setup the vars and you're away.

Fred.

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