Matthew McCullough, a member of the Sonatype training team and lead presenter with Ambient Ideas, was recently at JAX 2010 in Mainz.

Matthew is an international Java conference speaker, and is an active Maven community member, and an active contributor to many open source, and several Maven-specific projects, such as the Maven 2 CLI Plugin.

He sat down for an interview with JAXenter to talk about Maven.  Click here for the full interview in German (the English version will be available soon).

And to see the full offering of Sonatype training courses, click here.

We have added new videos and tutorials to Sonatype’s YouTube channel. Matthew McCullough’s training videos on the Enforcer Plugin part 2 walks you through the various motivations for having consistent Maven development environments, and shows you how to employ best practices. More videos will be added regularly, so check our blog often!

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.

Chariot Solutions, a leading technology consulting firm specializing in software development with Java and open source, is now a Sonatype Certified Training Partner.  Sonatype chose Chariot Solutions as a partner because of their deep understanding of Java training.

We are excited to have Chariot Solutions as a Certified Training partner…Organizations can rely on Chariot Solutions to provide a quality learning experience that will help them gain the most business value from their investment in Sonatype.

To learn more about Chariot Solutions, visit their website at www.chariotsolutions.com.  For more on Sonatype’s partnership with Chariot Solutions, click here.

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.

• January 12-14: MVN-101 – Maven Mechanics
• January 26-28: MVN-201 – Development Infrastructure Design

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.

Jason and I are doing a Maven tutorial at Øredev, a developer conference in Malmo, Sweden. The session is on Tuesday Nov 3 and will be based on Sonatype’s MVN-101 course, where we will explain the motivation behind Maven and go through its core concepts. The emphasis will be on the Project Object Model (POM) and underlying fundamentals such as the Maven lifecycle, plugins and goals, and its dependency management. Related development tools such as M2Eclipse will also be covered. The target audience for this session are developers who want to understand how Maven works and how to use it.

MVN-101 is a full-day course while the session at Øredev is time-limited to one afternoon, so it will be adapted to the participants’ knowledge level. As Tim blogged about in an earlier post, people new to Maven will benefit from the coverage of the fundamentals of Maven. However, if you have been using Maven for a while you will appreciate the thorough refresh and I think you most likely will learn something you did not already know about Maven.

Be sure not to miss Jason’s session on Maven 3.0 on Friday Nov 6 either! It’s going to be busy week for him as he is also speaking at a Maven meetup that I am organizing for the Swedish JUG in Stockholm on the 5th. For us Swedes, it is going to be a Maven week!

I, Anders Hammar, am a software architect and developer working for Devoteam Sweden. I strongly believe that having conventions and good tools is necessary in order to be productive, I use Maven and tools such as M2Eclipse and Nexus in my daily work. I also help our customers implement development environments based on Maven. For the Swedish market, Devoteam Sweden is working with Sonatype, providing Maven training and other services. I will blog here as a Maven fan for the community.

After teaching a number of Sonatype’s Maven training courses, I’ve come away with an appreciation for how much knowledge attendees bring to the table and how it can affect the class. I wanted to take some time to talk about each class: Who are these classes designed for? What do they have to offer the beginner or the expert?   What is the difference between 101 and 201?  In this post, I discuss the goals of our courses: MVN-101 and MVN-201, and some of the philosophy behind the content.

The Essentials, The Fundamentals: MVN-101

In MVN-101, our introduction to Maven, all students walk away with something new, something they didn’t know before they attended the class regardless of skill level, and that’s a guarantee.

While this class focuses on fundamentals, many people using Maven every single day are still unfamiliar with the Maven Lifecycle.   Sure, they’ve understood that default goals map to the default lifecycle, but maybe they didn’t know exactly how packaging affects the lifecycle or what options are available for binding goals to plugins. I’ve had a number of advanced students start the class skeptical that it had much to offer them, only to come back after class is over talking about the various little details of the POM they had been overlooking.

Don’t mistake the 101 in the course number for a signal that this course is designed to be simple. We don’t compromise the content, and we move quickly. MVN-101 covers a lot of ground for an eight hour course.  It is a survey of the POM, it is an introduction, and it moves quickly.

There is also something to be said for taking a step back to the fundamentals and learning about the history and motivation of the tool. Why are you using Maven? What are the alternatives? What differentiates Maven? What are the core conventions of Maven? Developers are most effective when they understand the core conventions and motivations behind the tool.

I’ve been asked if more advanced students should skip MVN-101, “If I am already familiar with the POM do I need to take the first class?” It depends, we split these classes up for a reason, we want to give people a chance to select the class (or classes) that are appropriate for them, but every time a students skips the first class and goes directly to the second there are always knowledge gaps about some of the more interesting portions of the POM.

My experience teaching Maven has convinced me that the vast majority of people using Maven could benefit from a quick refresh of the fundamentals. If you don’t fully understand the Lifecycle, the finer points of versions, the motivations behind Snapshots and Releases, you are likely missing out on some critical information that could translate to a more efficient, easier-to-maintain build.  If you use Maven in your organizations, someone should take a few hours to register, and attend this course.

There are two online MVN-101 classes November 3rd and 5th, and another on December 8th and 10th.

Advanced Enterprise Infrastructure: MVN-201

Our second class is geared toward the advanced developer and build engineer, students who want to learn about repository management and continuous integration as well as build best-practices. The focus of this class is on the who, what, why of repository management, but this focus also leads into continuous integration and how repository managers support workflow and collaboration. You’ve created software in MVN-101, now let’s focus on working together in teams, enforcing standards, and building the infrastructure for collaboration.

In preparing for the upcoming 1.4 release of Nexus, I’ve tried to take stock of our statistics and my unscientific analysis of the book download stats suggests that only 1 in 10, at best 1 in 5, developers using Maven are learning about repository management. (Source? book PDF download numbers.) I view this as a challenge to try to convince more developers that developing without a repository manager is akin to rock climbing without a rope and harness. You should walk away from MVN-201 convinced that repository management isn’t “optional”. It isn’t something “extra” that you may or may not integrate into your build architecture. It is the difference between a development team that can collaborate, and a development team that is bumbling around at deployment time trying to exchange JARs and support custom build solutions.

This class focuses on Nexus Open Source, starting with the basic installation of Nexus and progressing toward running Nexus as a component in a larger, enterprise deployment of Nexus and Hudson.

In MVN-201 the instructors are given more leeway to address specific student questions. We build more time into MVN-201 for discussion and analysis of course content because we’ve learned from experience that it is the students that drive more advanced content. If you are taking MVN-201, I’d encourage you to do some reasearch, come armed with questions and try your best to ask our instructors the most difficult, most esoteric questions you can.

We’re teaching two online MVN-201 class on November 10th and 12th and December 15th and 17th.

Note: Some of you might be wondering why the 201 classes focuses on Nexus Open Source.   If we were going to emphasize Nexus Professional, we’d have to have another two or three hours of instruction time in the class.  We decided that it was essential to get the foundations of repository management and focus on the essential, basic elements of repository management.   There is an overview of the features, and the instructor has the option of going through a section that demonstrates Nexus Professional.

Sonatype – the Maven Company – is the best source for learning about efficient infrastructure for your software development teams. Starting this week, it is easier than ever to get started.

Sonatype now offers online training courses. No need to book a flight, hotel, or car: all it takes is a high-speed internet connection and a computer capable of signing into a WebEx training session.

We offer an introduction and an advanced course: Maven Mechanics and Development Infrastructure Design.

The first course, Maven Mechanics, offers the required knowledge for every software developer who works on a project that uses Maven to build and maintain software. After taking this class, you will understand the motivation for Maven, foundational concepts like the Maven Lifecycle, and the procedures for customizing a Maven build. It provides a solid foundation for anyone who wishes to proceed to take the second course.

The Development Infrastructure Design course goes into details of how to best design and implement a development infrastructure stack, from source control management, to repository management, build, and continuous integration. We use Maven, Nexus, m2eclipse, and Hudson technologies to cover these topics, and we discuss some of the emerging trends in this rapidly developing area of software development. Every software development project should have at least one engineer with the knowledge acquired in this course.

The online courses are delivered in two 4-hour sessions, generally on a Tuesday and a Thursday of the same week. For our enterprise customers, these courses can also be combined to create a comprehensive curriculum for on-site delivery.

If you would like to find out more about the courses, visit our Training page or contact us directly.

We have some new training dates for June-October 2009, and we’re going to be adding some new cities to the mix as well:

• May 19-20, 2009, Chicago, IL
• June 9-10, 2009, Mountain View, CA
• June 23-24, 2009, Chicago, IL
• July 7-8, 2009, Mountain View, CA
• July 28-29, 2009, Boston, MA
• August 4-5, 2009, Mountain View, CA
• August 25-26, 2009, Chicago, IL
• Sept. 8-9, 2009, Mountain View, CA
• Sept. 22-23, 2009, New York, NY
• October 6-7, 2009, Mountain View, CA
• October 27-28, 2009, Chicago, IL

For more information, or to sign up go to our Training Pages

New Training Material

We’ve been working on our training material for a few months, trying to create the right mix of content. With a topic as wide as Maven it is a challenge to figure out the correct sequencing of some of these topics. What comes first: the Lifecycle or the POM? Should the training focus on examples that lead the slides or should it develop the material iteratively never demonstrating that which hasn’t already been introduced? I think we’ve found the right balance between instruction, discussion, and hands-on experimentation. A good training class is a class that gets aggressive about fitting content into the day. From the agenda below, it should be clear that we’re teaching content all the way until the end of the class, there is no filler content, we’re going to be focused on the content from start to finish.

Our agenda brings someone without any Maven experience up to speed on Day One. At the end of Day One those that have never used Maven before will understand the POM, the Lifecycle, the nature of a Maven Plugin. Even those with previous Maven experience will benefit from the Day One content by being introduced to the fundamentals they might have missed picking up the tool in a workplace environment. The Day Two content is full of content that introduces more enterprise and best-practices content. In addition to the agenda shown below, be sure to check out our sample module and our sample lab:

Maven Training Agenda

The Value of Sonatype’s Maven Training from Sonatype on Vimeo.

This video discusses the value of Sonatype’s Maven Training. Most software developers are faced with a constant information overload; there are too many frameworks and platform competing for our attention, and there is little time to learn the technologies which we need to learn to keep up-to-date in our industry. As a reaction to this, we’re all masters of ad-hoc learning. A good developer, can pick up a tutorial on a technology like Hibernate or Spring and attain a basic knowledge of the tool in a few hours.

While such “ad-hoc” learning is an essential skill it often leaves us with some glaring gaps in our knowledge. A platform or framework learned in a few hours is rarely fully grok’d, and while ad-hoc learning might be sufficient for a seldom used framework, it is often not enough to “half-learn” a foundational tool like Maven. This is why Sonatype has designed a two-day class which will bring a student up to speed with Maven without glossing over some of the critical details such as the Lifecycle or Custom Plugins.

Instead of asking your developers or colleagues to “wing it” to learn Maven “on-the-fly”, you’ll realize greater efficiencies if you send them to our light-weight training experience in Mountain View, CA. After two-days of undivided attention to instruction from the Maven experts, a developer will leave knowing that they have total awareness of the capabilities and motivation for Maven.

If you are interested in signing up for Sonatype’s Maven Training class, you can signup by going to http://sonatype.com/solutions/training