Maven Central In Your Hands and Other News

I am still here at JavaOne 2015, enjoying the last day and looking forward to the community keynote, but there is some news I want to share. Jason van Zyl and myself presented about Apache Maven developments and news.

Our presentation was well attended and the audience learned about things like Maven Wrapper, .mvn project local configuration, smart builder and safe local repository access. We showcased integration testing in the Android Maven Plugin, project generation from dot files and as well the usage for Ruby, Groovy and YAML to author your POM. If you want to find out more you can check out the presentation slides (and the source).

All that would have already comprised a great session and we received LOTS of questions and interest during and after the session. However there was one more thing:

Google is providing a fully synced version of the Maven Central repository in their Google Cloud Storage.

Jason has tirelessly worked with Google to make this happens. Sonatype, our sponsor for managing and hosting Central, has provided tremendous help as well. Jason wrote more about the history and his ideas in a blog post.

In a nutshell you can choose to use the Google repository URL (https://maven-central.storage.googleapis.com) as an equivalent replacement for Central. You can do that in your settings.xml or even better in your Nexus repository manager.

This is especially useful for users of the Google Compute Engine and Cloud Storage systems, since any downloads are essentially local to the network and therefore blazingly fast (and cached and so on).

On the other hand this provides a tremendous playground for experimentation around enhancements to the repository as well as data mining and analysis of the contents of the repository.

I am excited by the potential this has for the Maven community and beyond and look forward to all the results coming out of this effort. A huge thanks goes to Jason, Sonatype and Google for enabling this step into the future.