Maven Training December Round-up
We’ve got two more training classes coming up in January. These classes have been filling up, so make sure that you register early if you are interested. In the following post, I’m going to summarize some of the things we’ve learned from training this month.
Question Trends: Maven 3 and OSGi
Many questions and much interest around Maven 3. When is it going to be available? When can people start using the polyglot extensions? More and more people are starting out with teh assumption that OSGi is a target platform. I received more and more questions about the various tools that are available for OSGi development. This gave me the chance to feature some of the content from the (still developing) Maven Handbook. If anything I’ve learned that we’re going to need to be a bit more proactive in our Maven 3 coverage.
Participate: Ask Questions
A word to the wise, if you are going to take one of Sonatype’s training classes, I’d encourage you to come armed with some interesting questions. We’ve built enough time into our class to answer questions. We’ve found that students who engage our instructors usually come away with a better experience, and the online format makes it important that students actively participate. While there is a fair amount of slide-driven instruction, our instructors want you to interrupt them to ask questions.
A good teacher realizes that teaching is more a process of listening to students and reacting to the way a student learns a particular subject. In a classroom setting, it is easy to see how a student is sitting – if they look confused or eager to ask a question. In an online training format, it is more difficult to react to students without being in the same room. While WebEx has a few controls that help students signal and chat with instructors, the technology can often get in the way of engagement. My policy for training classes is to encourage engagement, I tell every student that takes one of our classes to interrupt.
Global Reach
I had the opportunity to teach one of our December training classes, the experience was interesting. For starters, our class spanned the globe for the first time. I always try to gauge how global our classes are by calculating the absolute difference in time zones. For the first time, we had students on one end of the globe being instructed by an instructor on the other. We had students in the Middle East being instructed by an instructor in New Zealand for one of our classes. Our training platform, Cisco’s WebEx platform, makes distance a non-issue.
Nexus Book (Edition 2.0.1): Fixes to the Plugin Development Chapter
Anders Hammar found a few issues in the plugin development chapter, after taking a closer look myself I identified and fixed a few inconsistencies which were quickly addressed in edition 2.0.1. These changes relate to the use of the Nexus Plugin archetype and some details about the generated Nexus Plugin descriptor.
For a list of changes in Edition 2.0.1, please see the release notes for this edition in the Nexus book.
Nexus Book (Edition 2.0): Fixes, Refactored Introduction
Even though many of you are busily enjoying the year-end holidays, we’re busy at work trying to make quality software. We’ve just cut Edition 2.0 of “Repository Management with Nexus”, this edition has some important bug fixes and a refactored introduction. Much of the introductory “What is a Repository?” material has been pulled out of the introduction and placed into a new chapter dedicated to the concepts of repository management.
For a list of changes in Edition 2.0, please see the release notes for this edition in the Nexus book.
Special thanks to John Yeary and Anders Hammar for providing essential feedback and for identifying typos and errors.
Installing Nexus Open Source on a Linux Server
If you are considering Nexus Open Source, here is a quick-start video and PDF handout for installing Nexus on a Linux server. This video and handout focused on the installation process for Redhat-variant distributions (Fedora Core, RHEL). The process takes about 4 minutes start to finish and can be summarized as “Download”, “Unpack”, “Create a few Symlinks”, “Configure as a Service”, “Go”.
This PDF covers the same ground as the video for those of you who are looking for something simple to print out.
In other news
Welcome to the weekly roundup of blog posts that mention Nexus, Maven, and other projects that Sonatype developers contribute to.
Liferay Maven SDK “Starting to recover from jetlag after a two week trip Los Angeles and Liferay retreat. One of the things we finally made some progress during the developer retreat is providing official maven artifacts for Liferay as well as porting our plugins sdk to Maven. Things are not quite completed but I will provide some instructions here for all early adopters. So our goal is to provide our CE releases through our own public repository as well as provide means for our EE customers to install the EE versions artifacts to their local maven repository.” By Mika Koivisto, On 12/15/09
Vit on Software Development: Would You Consider Moving from .Net to Java? “First, I should clarify that I am a long time .Net developer with quite a few high grade projects behind. And I am in fact still heavily using excellent .Net Framework. There is certainly place for both of them, no flame war intended. But you know, everyone has a favorite one. With this post I start a series of articles in which I will try to explore some really cool Java technologies, which not so long time ago made Java my framework of choice.” By Vitaliy Tsvayer, on Friday, December 11, 2009
Tomas Malmsten’s blog: Automating Android test project with Maven “The last post explored how to enable Maven builds in a standard Android Eclipse project. This post will show how to enable the test project to be built with Maven. It will be a bit simpler to enable Maven builds in the test project since we will not need to do any of the prep work. The only thing required is to create a pom file for the test project…” By Tomas Malmsten, on Thursday, December 3, 2009
