This video features Jason Van Zyl, the chief architect and co-founder of Mergere.com, who talks about Apache Maven 2.0. The presentation took placed on Wednesday 20th September 2006. The venue was a Sun Microsystem’s London Bridge office, the Customer Briefing Centre. Apache Maven 2.0 is a build tool similar to Apache Ant but fundamentally is declarative rather than imperivative instructed. Maven manages also project dependencies, because it incorporates at the first instance, an understanding of your projects infrastructure. Maven has a development infrastructure that not only supports building and testing projects. It also helps with documentation, running continuous integration, and handles release and artifact management. In this respect it is a far better project management tool than Ant could ever be. The key to Maven’s success is its adherence to convention-over-configuration, model driven development and of course good design and reuse. The biggest secret to understanding Maven is the Project Object Model (POM). The POM and its ancestral parent the Super-POM drive a Maven build project. Maven 2 is just a kernel for building software project, if you like, and it delegates responsibility to plug-ins, otherwise known as Mojos. There are different Mojo for most things, like the Java compiler, running unit tests, installing JARs, WARs, EARs ( and other artifact) into a repository, or generate test reports, and javadoc. Mojo can also connect to your version control system, and can even execute code coverage and cross referencing reports. So that is a very short introduction into Maven 2. With this presentation Jason also discusses other projects like Archetype, Archiva: the new name for the Maven Repository Manager, and Continuum: the continuous integration tool.

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