Alpha 0.3: Alternative Plugin Languages and Fixes
We’ve cut another release of Maven: The Definitive Guide. This version adds a new chapter on alternative plugin languages and makes some improvements to the Spring Web chapter (ch07).
The alternative plugin language chapter is light, I wanted to provide a starting point for people who were interested in starting to write plugins in Ruby, Groovy, and Ant. The Groovy and Ant sections need more development, but the Ruby section should be sufficient for someone looking to start writing custom Maven plugins. Over time, you should expect this chapter to fill out a bit, we still need to add sections about calling Ant tasks from a Groovy Mojo and I’m thinking about adding a more complex Ant example. Note that we cut Beanshell from this version of the book so that we could devote more time to these three languages. Please let us know what you think of the content.
As always, we’re working towards getting this book into production and we really value your feedback. Please send all feedback to book@sonatype.com. We’ve had some really great feedback to date and a number of readers have helped us catch some errors and clarify some issues. I’m making it a practice of added people’s names to the acknowledgements as we go along. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to send us feedback.
- Simple (ch03): Added a quick note to the simple chapter which clarifies where to run mvn install
- Preface: Updated the preface to include acknowledgements
- Spring Web: Updated the spring web chapter to incorporate bug fixes and errors. This chapter now provides instructions for running the web application.
- Spring Web: Added the hibernate-commons-annotations JAR, even though we are not using the commons-annotations, we need this dependency for Hibernate to work properly.
- Spring Web: Added Velocity to the simple-webapp pom
- Spring Web: Removed the duplicate 1.5 source config in ch07 examples
- Spring Web: Upgraded to the Hibernate Mojo 2.1 (Reyes released this last week)
- Alt Plugins: Adding a Draft of the Alternative Plugin Language Chapter
- Alt Plugins: Added the Ant Plugin Example
- Alt Plugins: Added the Ruby Plugin Example
- Alt Plugins: Added the Groovy Plugin Example
The Definitive Guide: Alpha 0.2 Release
I just pushed another alpha release out to the live site: http://www.sonatype.com/book/. This release includes the following changes:
- A New Foreword: I wanted to provide something that set the expectations for the Alpha release. First, we’re taking a risk that someone might stumble upon the book and assume that it is a stable completed work. It isn’t. We don’t expect a lot of changes to the existing content over the next few weeks, but people should know, we’re still in an alpha stage of this book release. The Foreword also encourages feedback and points people back at this blog. Until we have a feedback email alias setup, send all email to tobrien@sonatype.com.
- Copyright: Sonatype intends to release this book under a Creative Commons license, but we’ve reserved all rights for our Alpha release. We’re not doing this to prevent you from using and redistributing the book, we just don’t feel comfortable allowing or encouraging redistribution of an unfinished production that has Sonatype’s name on it. As we get closer to a final production release, we will clarify the license that we intend to apply to this book. (It’ll be some variant of CC.)
- Preface Material: I always leave the preface to the last thing I do in a book, but the online version of the book seems naked without some expected intro material. The preface intro I wrote might be a little too grand? Maybe "How to Use this Book" is a little to sarcastic? If people don’t like this section, they should let me know. There is also a new section that encourages feedback. The feedback email address is tobrien@sonatype.com until we have a better email alias.
- Part I Introduction: Part I had no introduction, I added a lengthy introduction which reiterates the preface. I compares Part I to a Developer’s Notebook, but then it also makes the case for Part II. Is this section appropriate? You tell me.
It's an Alpha Release
We’ve just released an alpha build of Maven: The Definitive Guide, it is the first update in a number of months and we’re gearing up for a lot of activity over the next few weeks. This newer version of the book is a complete rework of the last release with a focus on being concise and comprehensive. We’ll be releasing two more chapters a week over the next month, so stay tuned.
I jumped into this book at the end of last year, and took the original content and decided to split the book up into two parts. Part I is a "by example" approach to Maven with an entirely new set of examples. Part II is more reference material. We’re still evolving the final structure of the book, but we’ve decided that we’re going to be as transparent as possible as we finish this book. Consider the book we released today to be an early alpha, you are definitely going to find some grammar and spelling problems, and we’re working furiously to produce a product that doesn’t sacrifice content or quality.
If you’ve been reading the book, you’ll notice that there are a few missing chapters. We’ve removed some of the material that dealt with plugin usage, site generation, and others. We have about seven chapters on in development right now. Stay tuned to this blog for more updates. We’re committed to opening up the writing process and being as transparent as possible.
