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20080211 Monday February 11, 2008

Maven now supports attributes in pom.xml?! In December 2005, I asked Is it possible to make pom.xml simpler?.

After seeing what the Spring Developers have done to simplify Spring context files, I can't help but think the same thing is possible for Maven 2's pom.xml. Is it possible to add namespaces and make something like the following possible?

Before:

    <dependency> 
      <groupId>springframework</groupId> 
      <artifactId>spring</artifactId> 
      <version>1.2.6</version> 
    </dependency>

After: 

<dep:artifact name="org/springframework/spring" version="1.2.6"/>

Or just allow attributes to make things a bit cleaner? 

<dependency groupId="org.springframework" artifactId="spring" version="1.2.6"/>

At that time, the general response was "That's how Maven works. It's a matter of taste. You'll get used to it." It's been two years and sure, I'm used to it, but I'd still rather write less XML. That's why I was particularly pleased to see Brett Porter's write Maven now supports condensed POMs using attributes:

The issue is being tracked under MNG-3397.

The result is that something like this:

<dependency>
  <groupId>junit</groupId>
  <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
  <version>3.8.1</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>easymock</groupId>
  <artifactId>easymock</artifactId>
  <version>1.2_Java1.3</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
...

Halves in length to something like this:

<dependency groupId="junit" artifactId="junit" version="3.8.1" scope="test"/>
<dependency groupId="easymock" artifactId="easymock" version="1.2_Java1.3" scope="test"/>
...

Now that wasn't so hard was it? ;-) Posted in Java at Feb 11 2008, 03:45:57 PM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

Much better.

Posted by Ben on February 11, 2008 at 04:22 PM MST #

All I can say is: WOOHOO! Now if we could get a stable release train, i.e. version x bundled with plugins of version x, then everything would be perfect :)

Posted by GB on February 11, 2008 at 05:17 PM MST #

GB - I agree. However, I would also add global exclusions to achieve perfection.

Posted by Matt Raible on February 11, 2008 at 05:29 PM MST #

Glad you like it :)

Posted by Brett Porter on February 11, 2008 at 10:55 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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