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20040625 Friday June 25, 2004

Maven's ibiblio repository: nicely out of date I have a feeling that Maven and I will never quite get along. I live on the bleeding edge, because you have to if you want to keep up with open source. I'm using Hibernate, Spring and JSTL in my Maven sample app. Hibernate is pretty up to date - ibiblio has 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 is the latest. Spring's JARs aren't too bad - 1.0.1 vs. 1.0.2 being the latest release. So much for getting spring-mock.jar quick and easy - since it's part of 1.0.2. JSTL is one version behind too.

Lesson learned: if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, don't use Maven. I suppose another option is to become the guy who uploads these new versions. That job looks rather complicated though. I'm guessing that most folks are simply maintaining their own repositories (or staying away from the bleeding edge). Posted in Java at Jun 25 2004, 09:41:31 AM MDT 9 Comments

Comments:

Although it's been quite a while since I investigated Maven, if I recall correctly you have another option - that of creating and specifying a local repository, which I assume you can populate with the latest versions.

Posted by Kelly Denehy on June 25, 2004 at 11:39 AM MDT #

Duh. I guess I should always read the entire blog entry before posting. :)

Posted by Kelly Denehy on June 25, 2004 at 11:40 AM MDT #

Really, it's not a Maven issue. Just encourage projects to upload their jars. Large groups, like ASF, Codehaus or OpenSymphony have their own repos sync'd to ibiblio on a regular basis.

Posted by bob mcwhirter on June 25, 2004 at 12:57 PM MDT #

Thanks for the clarification Bob. If that's the case, then can I just point to those repositories? What's OpenSymphony's repository URL? Another minor annoyance is you can't get JARs like jta.jar, mail.jar and activation.jar. Is it legal to store these in your own repository - but not publicly on the net?

Posted by Matt Raible on June 25, 2004 at 01:45 PM MDT #

OS doesn't have a repository, we're just pushing our new releases up to ibiblio (they should all be current)

Posted by Jason Carreira on June 25, 2004 at 02:05 PM MDT #

Matt, manage your jars locally: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2004/06/managing_stuff_with_a_web_server.html You could probably get that working with maven. I tend towards managing our OS deps in-house.

Posted by Bill de hÓra on June 25, 2004 at 02:24 PM MDT #

Thanks Jason - I was looking for "sitemesh" rather than "opensymphony". Now I'm good, too bad I need a CVS version. ;-)

Bill - that works great when you're developing a project. However, I'm developing a sample app that will be bundled in a product that developers will use. I suppose I can bundle the JARs in a local repository that we install. Or we can host the JARs on the company's site. Thanks for the feedback gents.

Posted by Matt Raible on June 25, 2004 at 03:15 PM MDT #

I create a local repository that is checked in to source control. I then modify the maven.repo.remote property to point to both ibiblio and the local one. (It takes some trickery, involving a path like file:///${basedir}/../maven-repo). But, in the end, it works out great. You can also do the maven.jar.override thing, but it involves specifying the location of every jar that isn't on ibiblio. Doing the local repo involves less work.

"if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, don't use Maven" sounds very harsh. It's also, based on my experience, untrue. If I wasn't using Maven, I'd be checking in *all* of my jars, not just the ones that aren't on ibiblio.

Also, here's a secret that I found out a few weeks back. Apache's Geronimo has a lot of J2EE jars at http://ibiblio.org/maven/geronimo-spec/jars. I know for a fact that the EJB, JTA, and servlet jars are there. I'd imagine that JMS and friends are included also.

Posted by matth on June 26, 2004 at 09:32 PM MDT #

You can live on the bleeding edge with Maven also. Just download the jars yourself if they are not in the IBiblio repository. You can also specify where the maven repository should be. So if you want it in your project folder instead of your home directory put maven.repo.local = lib in your build.properties.

Posted by Sven Andersson on July 03, 2004 at 02:30 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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