Read about the latest Sonatype developments in our October Newsletter, which you can read here.

The newsletter includes the following stories:

• Sonatype Insight: Get the Back Story on Our New Product
• New Nexus Training Available Now
• Webinar: Increase Benefits and Reduce Risk of Open Source
• Recently on Our Blog: Why You Need to Monitor Your Components
• Maven Training Dates

If you would like to get on our mailing list so you’ll receive the newsletter automatically, please subscribe here.

We’ve had many requests for a Nexus class and are pleased to announce that we have added Nexus Best Practices to our Sonatype Virtual Training lineup.

Nexus Best Practices will give you the knowledge and practical instruction to get the most from your Nexus repository. Take this class to get up to speed quickly, gain better control over your component usage, and see faster build times.

This virtual class is ideal for individuals and teams who are looking to get up to speed with Nexus quickly. It is also appropriate for existing Nexus users who are interested in gaining a greater understanding of the fundamentals, as well as advanced techniques and tips and tricks.

After this course, you will:

• Understand all of the benefits of using a repository manager
• Be proficient with installation and maintenance of your Nexus instance
• Use the Nexus user interface effectively as both a user and an administrator
• Support Nexus as a key component of your enterprise development infrastructure
• Gain control over the artifacts that can be proxied from external Maven repositories
• Understand how to use Nexus to support staged releases

Our first class is scheduled for Thursday, October 20 from 11:00AM-5PM EDT (GMT-0400).

Enroll today

Learn more

You’ve probably heard that Sonatype teaches a series of online Maven training classes. They are a great way to get you and your team up and running on Maven, and if you have any specific questions we also make sure to leave some space in the class to answer any questions you might have. In my experience, the students that get the most from our classes are the students that ask questions.

In this post, I answer some of the questions that came up in our last training session.

Q: Is there a flag to echo the md5/sha1 checksum during deployment?

Not directly via the deploy plugin flags, but with a separate plugin: http://code.google.com/p/maven-checksum-plugin/. Checksums can be created during install if desired, click here to read the Maven documentation about this method. Checksums can be calculated using typical POSIX tooling (md5sum) and shell scripts as well.

Q: How do I select a SSH Private Key to use for SCP file transfers?

This is answered in the Maven Documentation here. Also, Pascal Thivent, a very active Maven expert on Stackoverflow, has a great answer for this on StackOverflow here. The answer is that you can specify which private SSH key to use in the server element of your Maven settings as follows:

<server>
        <id>myserver</id>
        <username>matthewmccullough</username>
        <privateKey>~/mykeys/id_rsa</privateKey>
        <passphrase>myphrase</passphrase>
</server>

Q: For an Ivy repository, how can an artifact be retrieved from Maven?

If the canonical repository format is Maven, then Ivy is really acting in compatibility mode with Maven and all is well. However, if the repository is in Ivy format (no pom.xml files), the story is a bit more rough: http://markmail.org/message/ohmlv5mk7j7i4smf. My observation is that even when folks are using other build tools like Ivy, Ant, Gradle, Buildr and Leiningen, they typically all agree on the Maven repository format. Most if not all of the build tools recognize and thus have a “Maven repo reading” compatibility.

Note: as the community moves forward on the Aether library, you should see tools start to either converge on best practices when it comes to repository access or get left behind it they decide to interact with repositories in a non-standard way. Tools that interact with Maven repositories should all be using Aether.

Q: Are there any tutorials about writing maven plugins?

Yes, here are two good sources of information:

• The Apache guide: click here
• The Sonatype book: click here

Due to incredible demand for Sonatype’s Maven training courses, we have added an additional training date to the February schedule.

On February 22, 2011 we will be holding an extra session of Maven 101: Maven Mechanics. This course is the premier Java developer training course. It covers Maven installation and configuration, explains the motivation behind Maven and gives an overview of related development tools. You will leave this Maven tutorial equipped with a full understanding of the Maven Project Object Model (POM) and a firm grasp of the underlying fundamentals of this development kit.

Enroll in MVN-101 today before spaces fill up!

Sonatype uses the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2, for all our training lab machines. Most of our students use a training workstation for 3-4 hours per class, and since we often have bursts of custom training activity it just wouldn’t make sense for us to own real, physical hardware to support training. If we were maintaining our own hardware, we would have to either maintain enough capacity to teach several classes simultaneously, or we would have to limit the number of classes we deliver. For Sonatype’s training effort, instantiating machines as they are needed is the right thing to do and is exactly what the cloud is designed for.

Sonatype has leveraged AWS’s great set of command line APIs and written scripts on top of them. We just invoke “instantiate-lab-machines-small.sh 10″ and poof, we have a set of pristine machines for the students, all running VNC as a service (for remote desktop access) and pre-setup with the latest version of Maven, Eclipse, and the m2eclipse plugin. No teardown. No hardware maintenance. No hassle. We even have a subsequent script that lists out the machines hostnames for each copy-and-paste into the email that goes out to the students.

While our overhead for training infrastructure is smaller than it has ever been, our use of AWS is about much more than just the reduction in cost associated with cloud-based hardware, we’re much more agile because it takes us 10 minutes to create infrastructure. I don’t even want to imagine owning these lab machines. As our training offerings expand, we’ll be using more and more of these lab machines. I can foresee a day when we’ll literally have a set of AWS machines up around the clock to serve our training offerings. Until then, it’s pay by the hour — the raison d’etre for cloud based offerings.

Click here for more information about Sonatype Training.