The Nexus Professional 1.2 release was released on Thursday along with Nexus OSS 1.2.0.4.
Nexus Professional is comprised of a set of plugins bundled atop the Nexus OSS Core. The initial version of Nexus Professional adds a few essential features for any organization that is constructing an efficient software development life cycle (SDLC) around Maven. Here is a more detailed examination of some of the features available in Nexus Professional 1.2. If you are interested in anything in this list, download your evaluation copy today.
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LDAP - The LDAP connector is able to do authentication and authorization against an external system. It also supports Active Directory. With LDAP you are able to leverage existing LDAP groups and map those to roles. You are also able to override the roles and privileges in Nexus or simply use LDAP for password management. It's been designed to support varying use cases gathered over the past year from our customers big and small. The user and role management screens have the external user management support baked in to make this as easy to manage as the current internal system in OSS.
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Staging and Promotion - The staging and promotion suite allows you to have an additional checkpoint on your release artifacts before they go live in a release repository. A single URL for all projects is all you need in your distributionManagement (in a corp pom for example) and Nexus can sort out where they go based on profiles you define. These profiles allow you to control which artifacts get staged together, who gets notified, who can see them, etc. These staged artifacts go into a temporary repository that is created on the fly when you deploy. This repository is then used for testing and subsequently dropped or promoted in a single transaction to your release repository. We've been using this for the Nexus OSS releases for a few months and it saves us tons of time when we stage / test / restage releases, and completely eliminates the manual artifact and metadata manipulation previously required.
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Procurement - Procurement repositories act as a firewall in front of another Sonatype Nexus Repository or Group. In this way, you can choose to firewall your entire organization or just your build and release team and/or CI. The way it works is like an internal proxy with firewall rules. You explicitly allow/deny artifacts by their group, group:artifact, group:artifact:version (all support wildcards) and only those artifacts that are allowed can be retrieved via the procurement repository. It also acts like a hosted repository where the artifacts here are protected from all tasks that may purge data and it has its own storage folder for easy backup and archiving. We anticipate that the procurement repository would become your repository of record for reproducing official builds in the future and will make archiving and restoring this repository possible via the UI in future releases. The procurement repositories are first-class repo citizens which means they can be grouped along with other repos to suite just about any process combination you can imagine.
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P2 Proxying - P2 content types are now supported for Proxy repositories. This can speed up the distribution of osgi and eclipse target platforms within your organization. In the 1.3 release, we will have support for mirrors and grouping of P2 repos.
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Priority Professional support - This will get you access to a dedicated mail list and Jira project for support and fix requests.
The Nexus Pro release is priced at $2995 per server / year and is available now. Trial versions are available and are converted to a full version with the application of a license key (no reinstall/ migration needed). Get your trial and key at the Sonatype platform.
Also worth noting is the availability of three levels of paid Maven support and Maven training (onsite and public classes). You can find details at the store.
As I mentioned above, the Pro version is and will continue to be a superset of plugins built upon the OSS core. The plugins are separate code trees and we do not maintain separate branches or copies of the core code, what you see in the OSS tree is everything we have. You won't find delayed code drops or untested releases here. We remain committed to providing the highest level of quality for the core and Nexus is the only repository manager with dedicated full-time QA staff. Providing the extra functionality and support needed by commercial users will help us continue to drive our efforts to support Maven 2.x/3.x, the Maven book, M2e, and Nexus.
You can read more about Nexus pro on our site, in the New York Times, Infoworld, and SD Times.
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