Sonatype Maven Training – MVN 201 continued

Continuing with my list of impressions and ideas from yesterday follows the next list:

  • the maven-site-plugin can be used together with the maven-pdf-plugin to produce a PDF version of your project site, although I would have to check more to see how good that really is
  • Sonar looks pretty amazing
  • Let me say that again. Sonar is awesome. I ran it against the Maven Android Plugin and samples codebase and all the input for improvements you get is amazing. And it was dead simple to set up too.
  • some really good examples for web application setup including integration tests can be found in Matthews tutorial projects on github
  • I can only reiterate my point from what feels like ages ago – having a local Nexus install is great!
  • Nexus has a feature for hosting a Maven site, which can be uploaded with the site distribution using dav – unfortunately that feature is not in the open source version although imho it should be 😉
  • the continuous integration server Hudson‘s install with the container within the war and just starting the whole thing as java -jar hudson.war is pretty sweet

So these are my random thoughts. So what is my overall conclusion? Even though most of the material was not new to me, since I have been using Maven 1 + 2 for a long time, the course was a great overview and refresher that offered some new things to know as well. The various support material provided is great and allows for much deeper investigation on your own time afterwards. Matthew was going at a perfect pace in the presentation taking all our questions into account and leaving no one behind. Any company that is using Maven can either invest a lot of time in their staff learning Maven via books and practical experience or they could send them to this training. It seems to me that there is no way you could learn all the material covered as quickly and efficiently as in the course though. So unless you already have a Maven maven on your team, you might want to consider sending someone to this training. Thumbs up from me.