New official Maven Central repository in Europe
Maven Central has become an increasingly important resource for the development community at large. We’ve put several efforts forward earlier this year to help improve the content quality and to reduce the time required to get artifacts into the repository. These have matured over time and are now automatically validating artifacts. These processes are documented for Maven Projects and 3rd Party Artifacts.
To improve the experience for users in Europe, Sonatype has provisioned a new official repository in the United Kingdom. This is more than a mere mirror of Central, this system is updated in lockstep with the systems here in the US, and is managed and monitored 24×7 by Contegix, the same team watching over the US repositories. The new repository consists of two fully redundant systems running in parallel to provide complete fail-over capacity.
In addition to the new repository, we have taken several steps to improve and further secure Central itself:
Google's GWT 2.0.4 Available on Maven Central (via Nexus OSS)
Sonatype is happy to announce that Google Web Toolkit 2.0.4 jars are now available in the Maven Central repository. The Google Web Toolkit blog explains this move in more detail:
Better maven support has been frequently requested on the issue tracker and mailing list, and this is a first step in that direction. In the future, Google will publish GWT releases to maven central as part of the release process.
The GWT 2.0.4 jars currently in the repository include gwt-user, gwt-dev, and gwt-servlet. To publish these artifacts in the Maven Central repository, Google publishes artifacts to Nexus OSS, the Open Source oss.sonatype.org repository. You can see the Google-specific repository on this server here. Releases are staged to this Google repository on oss.sonatype.org and then subsequently released and synchronized to the Maven Central repository.
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Nexus: Improving Maven Central and Supporting the Maven Ecosystem
Nexus is more than just a repository manager. It is a project that has been developed using the same underlying infrastructure of Maven, and it has forced us to think about the different ways in which the components that comprise Maven can be integrated with other, more complex systems. It is a critical step toward a more mature Maven ecosystem which starts to encompass much more than just software builds. You can think of Nexus as the second major project to emerge from the Maven ecosystem – an ecosystem which includes both commercial interests as well as open source volunteers and community participants.
Sonatype is focused on improving the foundational infrastructure which will allow us to improve the quality of artifacts and their accompanying metadata in Maven Central and Maven repositories around the world. A lot of this is not especially glamorous work and though many people complain about the state of some of the Maven repositories, very few take action. Here are some of the things Sonatype is doing with Nexus to improve the state of the Maven ecosystem and expand its scope.
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Publishing Your Artifacts to the The Central Repository
If your project’s artifacts are published to the Central Repository it is trivial for your users to add a dependency and start using your project’s library or framework, but if your project is hosted somewhere like Sourceforge and there is no repository manager or repository setup for synchronizing to the Central Repository, getting your artifacts into Central can be a pain. The old process for publishing your artifacts to Central required several manual steps for you and for the Maven team to setup and enable an rsync location… assuming you can find a location to host your files at all.
At Sonatype, we want to make synchronizing and publishing your artifacts to Central easier both for you and for us, and we want to improve the quality of repository metadata for everyone at the same time. We have set up a dedicated instance of Sonatype Pro for Nexus at http://oss.sonatype.org specifically to host the artifacts of other Open Source projects. In this post, I talk about the process of creating a repository for your open source projects and publishing artifacts so that they will be available from the Central Repository.
What is a Repository Manager?
Download “Introduction to Repository Management” as a PDF
What is a Repository Manager?
- A proxy for remote repositories which caches artifacts saving both bandwidth and time required to retrieve a software artifact from a remote repository, and
- A host for internal artifacts providing an organization with a deployment target for software artifacts.
In addition to these two core features, a repository manager also allows you to manage binary software artifacts through the software development, quality assurance, and production release lifecycle. In addition to these core features, a repository manager can search software artifacts, audit development and release transactions, and integrate with external security systems such as LDAP. A repository manager is a powerful tool that encourages collaboration and provides visibility into the workflow which surrounds binary software artifacts.
