Jeff Mesnil
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All I wanted was to build my jar and I got a web site

July 2, 2004

Via Dion, my quote of the week :

All I wanted was to build my jar and I got a web site.

Jonas Boner, AspectWerkz/BEA

I see more and more projects which use Maven as their build process also use Maven to run their applications...

Maven is a build process with (some) advantages and (lots of) inconveniences but it's not made to run applications. Yes, it is possible to do it but I find insane to have to download Maven, set it up just to run another application which has all its dependencies already downloaded... Maybe (crazy thought!) Maven and Ant could be used in a complementary way:

  1. Maven for the build process (but IMHO Ant 1.6 is a better choice)

  2. Ant to run the application

Or maybe, even better, we could improve java -jar and use scripting (Jython, Groovy,...) to get rid of Ant or Maven to run the applications (cf. Jetty or Eclipse).