Review by Elliot Metzger

I've been working with Maven 2.0.2 for the past week, moving some small, local projects from "Plain Ol' Ant" to Maven 2.

It has been a pretty smooth process (granted these projects are nowhere near the size of Sakai). Gone are project.xml, maven.xml, project.properties, build.properties (I think build.properties is no longer consulted but am not sure). In place of that you have a pom.xml for each module, and individual users keep their personalized settings in $HOME/.m2/settings.xml (so no, Maven 2 stuff won't stomp on Maven 1 stuff - the Maven 2 repository is in $HOME/.m2/repository). I know that elements that would go in settings.xml can be carried and distributed in pom.xml as well.

POM's themselves are stored in the M2 repository, so that allows M2 to get metadata about a project and its artifacts without downloading all the artifacts.

Gone also is jelly script. Plugins are written totally in Java (I think beanshell is also supported).

Maven 2 is multi-project aware off the bat, which is really nice. No more "maven -Dgoal=clean multiproject:goal" and stuff like that.

M2 has mojo's (play on POJO) where in M1 they were goals.

If you use M2's "standard directory layout" for organizing your source, tests, and resources the size of the pom.xml can be quite small.

While M2 is up to 2.0.2, I have noticed that a lot of the plugins have "-alpha" in their version name. I'm not sure if that speaks to the stability of the Maven Plugin API or just the functionality of that particular plugin.

Transitive deps are nice too! I'd be willing with a group of folks to investigate a move.