About a year and a half ago I found out about Maven about the same time that I was becoming team lead for a new project and so I decided to do the investigation and set up our small project to use Maven in our build system. It really made it easier to integrate tests into our build and the way it forced us to componentize our project I think saved us a lot of headaches.

When Maven 2.0 came out I was neck deep in other issues with the project so I didn’t pay it much notice because our build was working just fine as it was, and other things were a higher priority. Maven 2.0 was pretty much a complete rewrite of Maven and wasn’t very will documented. Documentation is still a little sparse, but it is definitely getting better and Megere has even released a free eBook documenting how to get started with it. I am now using it secretly on one of my components I use, even though the “real” build is using a different system. I am using it to run my unit tests and look at code coverage reports on my local build.

Continuum is an open source continuous integration tool that just got a brief java.net write up. It is also developed by the Megere team and looks pretty nice, although I have little control over the build machines and setup around here, so I doubt I’ll be able to push it into use on the team, but I definitely intend to check it out.

It also looks like Megere is looking to bundle these two products into an offering they are calling Maestro.

Technorati Tags: Maven, Continuous Integration, Continuum