On Ruby and Rails, Ruby doesn’t seem to give you any advanced language features and still shares a procedural style of development. And it is still slow (Even the 1.9 release). I don’t know much about rails, but I can’t seem to find out why there is so much hype. Most of what I hear about the technology seems to be hype. But I will give Ruby and Rails the benefit of the doubt. They are taking jobs away from the J2EE world and getting support from major companies. Kudos for that, I guess.

Maven is what I really wanted to talk about. I don’t have the heart to write a maven script, but I am just frustrated trying to build a maven application. For example, scala? and other scala projects like lift-web use maven. Normally, I just build my own Ant script because I am pissed off with maven’s design.

First thing, I don’t build tools that need to download files from some repository. This is not specific to just Maven, but Maven thrives on it. Some of us might be behind a restrictive firewall or not have an internet connection. And there is nothing more frustrating than having to download 100MB of file from one repository location. No thanks.

And in general, why is Java/Jar Hell all that bad. It is not nearly the same as DLL hell. I guess Maven is supposed to solve the Jar Hell issue. Maybe it is just me, but is it really that difficult to have a listing of jar files and add that list to the java runtime arguments. I never understood why so many people have an issue with Jar Hell. In any case, Maven does a poor to OK job of finding those dependencies. I rarely can get a Maven application compiled.

“Maven is pretty decent in enterprise (large) projects. Typical properties of “enterprise” projects include overloaded scms, numerous concurrent releases/branches/versions/environments, some “impossible” scenarios to automatically test (i.e. COBOL-systems) leading to QA and testers, reporting and documentation demands from the foul project managers, developers of very different skill-levels (some outright dumb) and in general sub-optimal-everything — then maven flourish”

Maven 2 is a better choice than Ant for most new projects. The plugin for Eclipse may be crap but the one for Netbeans is excellent.

If you have such properties and try to reinvent the wheel or build your own magic heavenly supreme and elegant code in say Haskell — you are a way too optimistic code onanist who will create a lot of problems for yourself and doom yourself into fixing other peoples mistakes

If your projects don’t have such properties - or you have a stabile team of excellent programmers - or already have good control over your CI, builds and already manage to release often and successful - or even the number of dependencies are limited to say: 10 — I see no obvious reasons why you should be forced to use maven.

- the way maven fetches dependencies from the network seems to be stupid and makes builds run slow. i don’t understand why dependencies can’t just checked into source control.

- if you want to do anything not supported by maven you are in a world of pain.

- maven doesn’t seem to integrate well with IDEs. eclipse plugin is buggy as hell and randomly breaks other launch configurations in eclipse.

> Haskell

This is very interesting. Do you have any published example of a build written in Haskell?

What do you yourself use for building your Scala software?

Haskell