Apache Maven 3.0 is open to domain-specific languages

In a post on the Sonatype Blog, Maven's chief developer Jason van Zyl has made version 3.0 of the popular Java build tool sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) available to download. The developers have completely reworked the central build infrastructure. While migrating Maven development projects from version 1.x to version 2.x was a very laborious process, the new release aims at being decidedly more compatible than its predecessor. Where necessary, the contributing developers made use of compatibility layers.

The build tool now uses Google's Guice framework as its "Inversion of Control" container. Further additions include Aether, a standard library for interacting with Maven repositories, and the possibility of automatically generating a stack trace when an internal Maven error is encountered. Additionally, Maven's POM (Project Object Model) configuration file no longer has to be XML because the tool now includes Polyglot Maven, a framework for adapting DSLs (Domain-Specific Languages); this makes it possible to use such languages as Groovy or Ruby for the POM file.

The developers have also worked to improve the support of the hardware-independent, dynamic OSGi software platform and to integrate the tool into development environments. These aspects are handled by the Tycho project which, like Polyglot Maven, is developed by van Zyl's Sonatype company.

Further information about the release can be found in the release notes. Various download options are available on Apache's mirror servers (zip, tar.gz) and installation instructions are provided.

(crve)