Maven gets partially absorbed by modern JVM languages …

December 23, 2009 | 1 Minute Read
This post was originally posted on my old blog.

Maven has a lot of interesting and useful ideas, but its usage is often over-complicated and several concepts are too much entangled. (examples: 1, 2, 3)

The foremost feature of Maven that comes to mind is probably dependency management. Maven probably standardized dependency management for the Java platform. That’s probably also the reason for its wide adoption.

At this time there are already several attempts for smaller and easier solutions that repackage the ideas about dependency management from Maven. Their promise is to be a cleaner and easier to use.

Foremost there is Ivy, which provides Maven-like dependency management for Ant.

There are even two JRuby projects that bring simplified Maven-like dependency management to the JVM: maven_gem and javagems.

Especially interesting is Grape, which provides dependency management for Groovy at a language level (by integrating Ivy).

I think these examples are an impressive demonstration how the Java platform grows and how good ideas and concepts are adapted and evolved.