Thursday, November 01, 2007

Maven ... OMG

My recent foray into developing Maven plugins has led me to a horrible discovery : the Maven developers ... suck. They're just not professional. There's no javadoc for the core classes. There's no javadoc for the base plugin classes and interfaces. And the AbstractMojo class which is supposed to be a good starting base class for all other plugins is, to say the least, horribly designed : it doesn't contain access to the MavenProject that's currently being operated on, you have to add it in manually Ironically (or appropriately, take your pick) they made that a plugin too. The supposed "tutorial" on the Maven main site doesn't show any mention of this. The plugin "cookbook" on the site has been "coming soon" for so long that you have to wonder if it's ever going to get written. And, on top of all this, there's no generics and no direct support for JDK 5 annotations and enums. (See previous post). I've now reached a point of severe disappointment with the Maven project, and I'm fast approaching the point where I'm genuinely sorry that I've made this much of a time investment in it.

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