We were talking about creating a guide for this, but someone in the community beat us to it.  Yennick Trevels published an excellent guide in his blog that you can find here.  We highly recommend checking out his post if you want to use Gradle to deploy artifacts to the Central Repository.

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

Manfred Moser – Kicking Apps and Taking Names

We have had the pleasure of working directly with Manfred Moser for the better part of a year and have been familiar with his work for much longer. Given Manfred’s constant and continuous work with the community we are sure many of you know him but for those that don’t, here is a little bit of background on Manfred.

Manfred has been professionally developing software in Java since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed open source fanatic, as well as an Android application developer, consultant, author and speaker. He has a long history of developing software in Internet, enterprise and mobile spaces. He is now working as an Android application developer and consultant with his own company, simpligility technologies.

simpligility technologies brings simplicity and agility to software development, processes, products and customers. With Manfred’s engineering background, teaching experience and passion for tools and infrastructure, he loves helping and mentoring other developers and development teams. He is able to understand complex requirements, business processes and software systems and cut through all the distractions to the core purpose and aim of an application. With this background simpligility offers a myriad of helpful consulting services.

We have been very lucky to work with Manfred on a number of projects. He is a core committer to the Android Maven Plugin and has co-authored our Sonatype book Maven: The Complete Reference, where he recently revamped the Maven Android chapter.  He is a Hudson committer and co-authored the new Hudson Book with Tim O’Brien.  Manfred is also a core contributor to our brand new Nexus Best Practices training course materials.

Manfred is the founder of the Vancouver Island Java User Group in Victoria, BC and in addition to presenting at java user group meetings, he has also presented at a number of conferences around the world. His next appearance will be at AnDevCon II in San Francisco this week from November 6 to 9, 2011.  If you plan to be there, we highly recommend popping into at least one of his sessions. The two sessions Manfred will be leading are: Taking Advantage of Apache Maven for Your Android Builds and Testing Android Apps – Going from Zero to Hero.

You can follow Manfred on twitter @simpligility or read the simpligility blog here.

We would like to thank Manfred for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Manfred!

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

It Takes a Village…and Anders Hammar

We have been very lucky to work directly with Anders for a number of years now and we can confidently say he is one of the most seasoned Apache Maven experts and evangelists that we know.  We are sure many of you know him, but for those that don’t–here is a little bit of background on Anders.

Anders is a software architect and CTO of Devoteam Sweden, a Certified Sonatype Partner in Stockholm, Sweden. He’s been working professionally with Java for more than ten years.  For the last four years he has focused on Maven,  providing support, consulting and training. Anders works with development organizations to help them adopt and customize their use of Maven and Sonatype Nexus to set up a strong development infrastructure that allows them to build better software, faster.

Being a true believer of open source, Anders is active in several open source projects including Codehaus Mojo, Codehaus Cargo and the Apache Maven Project. Anders takes pride in giving back to the projects he uses in his professional work. It is not uncommon to find him giving a talk or tutorial on Maven or Nexus at conferences like Jfokus or Oredev. Lucky for us, he’s also one of the primary authors of the Sonatype Book Repository Management with Nexus and a contributing author to the rest of our Sonatype Books.

A personal note from Tim O’Brien on Anders: “Anders has been quietly and continuously contributing to all of our Sonatype books over the past few years, and he’s a big reason why you don’t have to suffer through all of my typos and misspellings.“

If you are located in Europe and are looking for Maven or Nexus consulting or training don’t hesitate to contact Devoteam Sweden. Under the leadership of Anders they can offer you the in-depth technical knowledge to help you get started with implementing a Maven or Nexus environment or improving an existing one with customizations.

We would like to thank Anders for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Anders!

After this webinar you will have the knowledge and tools you need to quickly and safely incorporate components into your projects. And as a bonus, when you participate in this webinar you will be one of the first to download the free public beta of the initial release of Sonatype Development Insight for Eclipse!

Webinar details:

• Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011
• Time: 10:30AM EDT (UTC/GMT-0400)
• Presenter: Brian Fox, Sonatype Vice President of Engineering

Produce higher quality code using the enhanced quality, security, and license data provided by the Sonatype Development Insight plugin for Eclipse. In this webinar you will learn how Development Insight for Eclipse will help you:

• Determine when new component versions are available and whether or not to upgrade
• Understand what versions of each component are used in your project
• Identify where a specific component is used
• Choose components that meet your quality, security and licensing standards

Register today!

Hudson: Move to Eclipse, Sonatype donates enhancements, and more

• Oracle announces Hudson move to Eclipse Foundation Oracle plans to contribute the Hudson core code to the Eclipse Foundation. Read Jason van Zyl’s blog or the stories in ADT, eWEEK, and SD Times.

• Sonatype donates enhancements We will contribute our Maven 3.x integration work to the Eclipse Foundation. Watch this community demonstration of the new features. Read more about our contribution in Application Development Trends.

• Sonatype launches Sonatype Pro™ for Hudson See our website for more details.

• Hudson Survey Sonatype and Oracle surveyed over 1,200 Hudson users to see what they’d like to see in future versions. The majority of respondents considered reliability and performance to be most important enhancements. Read a summary blog post or get the full details in this presentation.

Nexus News:  Enterprise Enhancements Coming Soon

We’ve been hard at work on Nexus too – not just Hudson.

• Enterprise Enhancements Our users tell us they want improved enterprise features. Centralized repository management ranks at the top, followed closely by high availability.  We will start rolling out these features this summer, beginning with centralized management. Watch this blog for more details. To try early releases or provide feedback to our engineering team, email us.

• Nexus 1.9.1 We released the latest version of Nexus last month with lots of important, under-the-hood changes.  For the full story check out Brian Fox’s blog post.

• New name You may have noticed that the professional, supported version of Nexus has a new name – Sonatype Pro for Nexus. Only the name has changed, everything else is exactly the same.

Sonatype Training: MVN-101 & MVN-201

Learn the know-how and best practices directly from Apache Maven and Nexus experts.

Upcoming Training Classes:

MVN-101: Maven Mechanics – 1 day virtual class Enrollment fee: $595 USD MVN-101 Maven Mechanics comprehensively covers Apache Maven installation and configuration, explains the motivation behind Maven and gives an overview of related development tools. Learn more.

Upcoming MVN-101 Classes Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 9:00AM – 4:00PM CEST (UTC/GMT + 0200) Monday, June 27, 2011, 11:AM-7:00PM EDT (UTC/GMT – 0400)

MVN-201 Development Infrastructure Design – 1 day virtual class Enrollment fee: $795 USD MVN-201 Development Infrastructure Design covers advanced Apache Maven topics and provides expertise with the structure of a Maven POM and a Maven multi-module project. Learn more.

Upcoming MVN-201 Class Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:00AM – 7:00PM EDT (UTC/GMT – 0400)

Follow Sonatype on Twitter

If you want to get updates from the Sonatype team the moment news breaks, follow us on Twitter @SonatypeCM.

If you would like to join our mailing list, you can subscribe here.

EclipseCon is the conference for anyone involved in Eclipse. As a proud member of the Eclipse Foundation, Sonatype is looking forward to another year of great talks, tutorials and BOF’s. We will be hosting a number of talks in the Cypress Room all day on Tuesday, March 22, 2011.

Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl will be giving a presentation on Building Eclipse plugins and RCP applications with Tycho, Nexus & Hudson.

Event details:

• Date: March 21-24, 2011
• Location: Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, CA
• Event website: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/

Stay tuned to the Sonatype blog for updates on Sonatype’s talks and presentations at EclipseCon 2011. And for the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter @SonatypeCM.

Working with the community, Oracle and Sonatype are each putting a number of full-time engineering resources on Hudson. The Hudson lead, Winston Prakash from Oracle, is highly skilled, very thoughtful, and he cares about the community. He is also the first person to create detailed, comprehensive architectural documentation.

This kind of documentation (which has never been available in the past) is required to understand how Hudson can be improved. The lack of architectural documentation, along with how decisions were made, left the Hudson community mostly dependent on a single individual for core changes.   Let’s be honest about where this led:

• The Hudson WAR distribution incorporates over 100 dependencies, a troubling number of which are forked.   As result, there is no easy way to incorporate improvements from those forked projects in Hudson. It’s also not very easy to know why they were forked in the first place.

• The core technology for the user interface in Hudson is Jelly. We used Jelly in Maven 1.0, but took it out more than five years ago for Maven 2.x because it is not maintained and very difficult to work with. Hudson is still dependent on Jelly, but there are many more standard, and flexible, options for the UI technology: choices like GWT, Vaadin, or JSF.

• Hudson has had minimal project infrastructure. There are extremely limited unit tests, and integration tests that leave a lot to be desired (e.g. they don’t run on recent versions of the Mac OS X). Weekly builds of Hudson without a sophisticated automated test infrastructure is just not wise. Winston and I will propose a plan to clean up some of the testing infrastructure as a first priority. We’re not in a rush to push out releases where the community has to act as QA. It’s great to get feedback from users but we think a better job can be done on the testing front to alleviate this burden on users. It’s not glamorous, it takes a lot of time, but it’s necessary if you value stability and quality.

• Little to no effort has been made to track the provenance of the code, and there are numerous licenses that are used throughout the codebase. The licensing issues can likely be resolved using different libraries, and doing some modularization, but the provenance and IP issues are of utmost importance when you care about downstream consumers. These issues are of little or no concern for SaaS providers, but critical for companies that need to deliver software used on-premise.

So, I’ve told our developers to stay focused on improving Hudson’s infrastructure and fundamentals. Here’s our current work log:

• Testing infrastructure, and bolster the unit and integration tests
• JSR330 support for plugins
• JAXRS support for web services
• Maven 3.x support (94% of Hudson installs also use the Maven plugin)
• Eclipse integration
• Netbeans integration
• Assessment of the current Hudson architecture
• JSR330 architecture work to modularize the Hudson core
• Using a standard view technology like GWT, Vaadin, or JSF
• Inspection of non-standard/forked dependencies and trying to re-align with current mainstream releases
• Isolating code with problematic licenses and trying to reduce the license footprint
• Using standard Maven plugins for creating ancillary Hudson distributions

I’ll describe all of this in greater detail in subsequent blog posts.

Special mention should be made of the efforts of Juven Xu and Peter Kriens who worked together to add Nexus OSS staging to Peter’s Ant build. Previously bnd artifacts were manually uploaded by occasional third-party requests to MAVENUPLOAD, often a very laborious process. Third-party uploads to Maven Central have since been streamlined and automated with Nexus, but OSS hosting is still preferred by project owners who want to stage and check artifacts as part of their regular build process.

On behalf of all the OSGi developers who use the maven-bundle-plugin I’d like to thank Juven and Peter for their work getting the latest versions of bnd onto Maven Central!

Sonatype is investing heavily to ensure the baseline M2Eclipse 1.0 is of high quality, stable, and maintainable. With the help of the amazing IP team at the Eclipse Foundation M2Eclipse has passed its initial IP review, has entered the parallel IP process and is slated to be released as part of the 2011 Indigo release of Eclipse. To be certain, this will be a great milestone for the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems: users have been asking for years to have good Maven integration included in the standard Eclipse distributions and this will be the year they get it. Indigo will ship this year on June 22nd, but in the meantime Sonatype will be working on and soon releasing Maven IDE!

What is Maven IDE exactly? Maven IDE is a Maven-focused distribution of Eclipse that will consist of a base Eclipse distribution, M2Eclipse and a series of Maven-focused integrations where there is strong support within the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems. What are some of the things we are looking at potentially integrating?

Frameworks and languages

JSR-330 & Guice integration: JSR-330 & Guice are now critical to the Maven ecosystem and very important to Sonatype as a technology. The JSR-330 implementation provided by Guice provides core functionality for Maven 3.x, Nexus, M2Eclipse, and Sonatype’s Maven 3.x integration for Hudson. We will create tooling for JSR-330 to help with our own work, general integration work for development infrastructures, and anyone using JSR-330.

Webapp development tooling: Webapp development is the most requested form of integration and we are still evaluating what’s available in WTP versus making something that is simpler and integrates more tightly with Maven. For those that don’t know, the WTP integration for M2Eclipse is not part of the codebase that moved to Eclipse. Sonatype will be working with the community on the M2Eclipse/WTP integration and will help distribute it from Sonatype, but we are also looking at alternatives to WTP.

Tycho integration: We already have support for Tycho inside Eclipse that allows Tycho projects to interoperate with PDE at a rudimentary level, but we would like to improve this integration and bring support for Tycho-based projects into the Eclipse IDE.

Maven Shell integration: This is where the Maven command line will intersect with the IDE. We see in the future being JSR-330 component based so we can leverage them from the Maven Shell and Maven IDE, and these components will participate in long-lived workflows that aid in the development of applications. We plan to use Drools Flow for the workflow implementation and the Eclipse tooling that exists for Drools Flow. The workflows will be accessible and usable from the Maven Shell as well as from within Maven IDE.

Polyglot Maven integration: For some of the selected grammars and dialects of Polyglot Maven we will provide support in Maven IDE. The folks at Itemis have been a great in helping us understand how Xtext can play a critical role in this regard. If a grammar can be represented in a form that Xtext understands then much of the plumbing for powerful editors can be created automatically using the Xtext framework. There are currently some integration issues between standard Maven and OSGi that need to be resolved but Xtext is an incredibly powerful language workbench. The Itemis guys have really done some incredible work.

Android development tooling: Android is becoming very popular and has a strong Maven contingent. There are sophisticated Maven-based tools for developing Android apps that have been created by Android community: the maven-android-plugin by Hugo Josefson from Jayway, the Eclipse integration exists as part of what Google provides, and Ricardo Gladwell has created the bridge between Maven and Eclipse with his Android M2Eclipse integration.

Scala IDE: Miles Sabin is creating great Eclipse integration for Scala with his Scala IDE project and David Bernard is bridging that work into Maven m2eclipse-scala. We are seeing a lot of demand for Scala integration with Maven.

GWT integration: GWT has rapidly become one of the standard webapp toolkits for Java and we’ve seen a lot of demand for better integration with M2Eclipse. Within the realm of development infrastructure GWT is very popular. Sonar uses GWT, Gerrit uses GWT, XWiki uses GWT, and Sonatype has chosen GWT as the basis of the UI for our Maven 3.x integration in Hudson. GWT will continue to gain momentum so it’s very likely we will have more sophisticated integration with M2Eclipse sooner rather then later.

Development infrastructure

Sonar integration: Sonar is becoming the de facto standard reporting and quality system for Java projects. Sonar is very Maven-centric and SonarSource has provided Eclipse integration that can easily be integrated with Maven IDE.

Hudson integration: Hudson is the de facto standard continuous integration server for Java projects. Sonatype is currently working on finishing our Maven 3.x integration and it will be integrated within Maven IDE.

Wiki editing & site publishing: Sonatype has a wiki page editing and publishing framework called Idiom — that is based on the WikiModel project — that we will be open sourcing, and hopefully merging with the tools that exist in the WikiText project at Eclipse. Ultimately we would like to see WikiModel merged with WikiText and then work together within the community to make great editing tools. If WikiModel could be wed with Xtext it would be amazing.

SVN integration: Obviously important and we initially removed the SVN support to clean up and focus on the core. We’re layering it back in as resources permit. It’s not going anywhere and there are actually two options now. Sonatype supports the Subversive integration which is the official SVN integration at Eclipse, but the community has contributed the Subclipse support. So both variants will be available and Maven IDE will ship with the Java-based SVNKit connector.

Git integration: Git is sweeping over the development community and has taken off like wildfire. At Sonatype we use Git for the vast majority of our projects so great Git integration with Eclilpse and Maven is vital.

Maven Central statistics and metadata: Many OSS projects have been thrilled with the statistics we’ve provided them and we’ll be working in the future to provide more value from the information in Maven Central and deliver it into Maven IDE. Maven Central is an unparalleled source of interesting and useful information for developers and we want to make all that information more accessible.

So you can see that the number of paths we can potentially take are limitless. What will really help us limit our choices are the partners we find who are as committed as we are to the Maven and Eclipse ecosystems. We’re not interested in individuals, groups, or organizations that are hedging their bets with Maven and Eclipse. We are looking for individuals, groups, and organizations who are committed to the Eclipse Platform and Maven as the basis of their development infrastructures.

Things we’ll be looking for in integration partners, are: Tycho build, good test infrastructure, and a composite p2 repository for integration. Maven IDE will first be available in an OSS community edition and will be followed by future commercial versions. We are excited about building out a polished, Maven-focused distribution of Eclipse and we’re really looking for feedback from the community about what integrations to pursue first. So please let us know!

Apache and Apache Maven are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. Maven Central is a service mark of Sonatype, Inc. Nexus, Maven IDE, Maven Shell, and Polyglot Maven are trademarks of Sonatype, Inc. Maven Central, Maven IDE, Maven Shell, and Polyglot Maven are intended to complement Apache Maven and should not be confused with Apache Maven.

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of official repositories in the UK to improve performance for the users in Europe. Today we are making the artifact download statistics available to the projects whose artifacts are served by Central. This has been one of the most frequently requested features by project teams. Since the raw Central logs are larger than seven gigabytes every day, processing this data is no small undertaking.

The statistics are available to all projects hosted using Nexus at http://oss.sonatype.org, http://repository.apache.org and http://nexus.codehaus.org. These three avenues represent the majority of projects actively contributing artifacts. Nexus’ security mechanism already in place on these instances provides a mapping of repository path to project which allowed us to easily roll up the counts for each team. Read more to find out how to access your project’s statistics.

Accessing Your Project’s Statistics

Current OSSRH, Apache and Codehaus users don’t need to do anything to gain access to these statistics. If you have deployer permissions for your project, you should already be able to see the Central Statistics link in the Views/Repositories section in the left-hand menu area. NOTE: In some cases, users with early access to the plugin have reported needing to click the web browser’s Refresh button before seeing the link.

Clicking on the Central Statistics link will open a tab showing you:

• a line chart depicting the volume of raw downloads of your artifacts from Central over the past 12 months
• a pie chart breaking down the last month’s worth of downloads of your project by artifactId
• a sortable grid containing the counts that generated the pie chart

If you only have access to a single project with a single groupId, the page will be fully populated upon opening the tab. If you have access to multiple projects or a project encompassing multiple groupIds, you will need to select a project and groupId on which to report. You can also use artifactId and version combo boxes to further narrow down the reporting scope for the timeline, the pie chart, and the grid.

The pie chart and grid can be further constrained by a date range combo box that defaults to the last month, but can be used to report on the last 3, 6, 9, or even 12 months or to select a single month for reporting.

Finally, the plugin offers two types of reports. Downloads is the default and simply reports on the number of successful downloads of your artifacts. Unique Ips is the second report type and gives an idea of how many unique users are downloading your artifacts. It is also possible to export the raw data to CSV so that you can analyze it using your own favorite tool.

Frequency of Update

Currently we generate the statistics to a granularity of a single month, so you can expect to see the new results appear within a few days of each new month.

Send us Suggestions and Feedback

This is just the first release of this plugin, and we invite your feedback and recommendations, not just on how to improve the look and feel of the plugin but also for new reports you’d like to see in the future. You are welcome to create issues in the following JIRA project:

https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/CENTRALSRV

When creating issues, please assign them to the “Central Statistics Plugin” component.