The Maven version 2.0 release is definitely an advancement for business-driven software development. Many organizations struggle to keep up with all of their IT projects and the high cost of maintenance due to differing project build, documentation, design, and deployment processes. Maven is a great tool to help alleviate these costs by creating structure across projects and still allowing implementors to innovate within their own internal team processes. These processes are usually provided as Maven plug-ins, also called Mojos, which can be shared with other projects.

An extremely interesting result of the 2.0 release is the extension capabilities of the architecture. Carlos Sanchez wrote a blog entry recently entitled “Maven Ruby Mojo Support”. This support for other languages inside Maven is a great benefit to the overall tool usage. With the increased popularity of interoperable platforms such as Java and .NET, all of these projects can have the same build tool. This ability would decrease project delivery, maintenance, and deployment costs tremendously for an organization who uses the tool wisely. This link shows the support for other languages in Maven 2.0. Besides the C and C++ plug-ins shown there, a C# plug-in is being created which will support compiling with the Windows .NET and Mono compilers along with NUnit and Visual Studio project support.

My own experience with writing a Maven 2.0 plug-in was extremely pleasant. The Maven Jini plug-in was originally created for Maven version 1.1 and took approximately 2 weeks to create due to issues with Jelly. Using the new Java Mojo style of developing plug-ins for version 2.0, I recreated the functionality of the original plug-in within 1 day. The Maven Jini plug-in version 2.0 will be released in the next couple of days on the default Maven 2.0 repository at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/. Please go to the Maven Jini plug-in home page for more details on how to use it.

Overall, Maven 2.0 is well worth the investment to learn about it‘s capabilities. There are multiple improvements over the 1.x versions such as transitive dependencies, performance, configurable build life cycle, built-in multiple project handling, and a highly flexible architecture to build upon. I recommend taking it out for a spin if you get a chance.