Preface
Welcome to the book about the Takari Extensions for Apache Maven TEAM and related tools and projects. We hope you will find this book to be a useful resource for getting started with TEAM and learning more about getting the most out of the advanced features it offers.
Welcome from Jason van Zyl
Maven has been around for over 10 years. The idea for the project predates the release by several years, but the tool you know as Maven has had a 10th birthday this year. During that decade, while the tool has changed, the core assumptions and conventions have stood the test of time. Ten years later, Maven is used in some of the biggest projects in the industry, and the tool has helped to create a healthy ecosystem of open source development, because it made it easy to share components.
The existence of a central repository for Java components is something all Java developers are now used to, and Maven was the project that established the first central repository for Java. The idea of convention over configuration for Java projects remains important to the projects I work with every day, almost 10 years later. Other build tools have attempted to create new standards and build conventions, yet Maven still provides the best balance between convention and flexibility.
If you want your organization to focus on delivering software and if you want to avoid creating custom build scripts that are difficult to understand and maintain, you use Maven. It provides a model that is easy to understand, and it can be adapted to meet most requirements.
What also became clear over these 10 years is that Maven’s conventions are not for everyone, and this is to be expected. When I hear that people are dissatisfied with Maven or when people call it inflexible and broken, I agree. Maven isn’t aiming to be everything to every build engineer. If you don’t follow the conventions it has clearly outlined, it is inflexible or broken. The tool is opinionated, and if these opinions are in conflict with your own, then the answer is to innovate.
Takari’s TEAM (officially known as Takari Extensions for Apache Maven) is Takari’s attempt to address several key issues with Maven in a distribution that is aimed at large-scale projects. In my own work with Maven I came to the realization that it was time to build a set of extensions and customizations on top of Maven that would allow it to stay as strong over the next ten years as it has been over the last.
While features like incremental builds and faster parallel builds will certainly be relevant to all Maven users, these features have been designed to address the needs of building at scale.
Who is this book for?
This book is written for users who have experience with Maven. While Takari does offer Maven training for users, this book will assume that you are familiar with basic Maven concepts such as the POM or the Maven Lifecycle. With TEAM, Takari wanted to make sure that we were focused on addressing critical gaps in Maven’s core and Maven’s plugins. Good Maven documentation isn’t one of these gaps, and if you are looking for practical information about Maven’s basic concepts, we encourage you to browse the Maven project web site at http://maven.apache.org
This book is written for someone currently using Maven or for someone evaluating using the TEAM distribution to improve an existing Maven build.
How to read this book
The TEAM book has been written as a comprehensive reference to the features offered by TEAM. If you are new to TEAM we encourage you to read the introduction, but if you are only interested in learning how to use a specific feature or plugin you will be able to skip to an individual chapter and get started.
We wrote each chapter as a stand-alone document that can be used independent of other parts of this book, and when necessary we will include a cross-reference to a related section in another chapter.
How to Contact Takari
Takari is available if you have questions about the TEAM distribution, questions about support, or if you have a suggestion for a new feature. We’re very interested in your feedback and suggestions.
Our website at http://takari.io/ contains numerous resources that might be of interest to you
To get in touch with Takari, we encourage you to send an email to team@takari.io
Takari Maven Training
Takari offers virtual training for Maven and custom training classes for Takari’s TEAM distribution.
Takari’s Introduction to Maven is a virtual training course that was designed to focus on practice rather than theory. The course is designed to bring everyone up to a base line of knowledge of Maven so teams can collaborate on projects more effectively.
For more information about Takari’s Maven training, email training@takari.io.
Takari Subscription
Takari offers support for Maven and the TEAM distribution with a subscription to the TEAM distribution. If your organization depends on Takari, we encourage you to subscribe to our commercial offering for the latest updates and information about the TEAM distribution as well as for early-access to features included in the TEAM distribution.
With a Takari subscription you’ll have the ability to receive direct support from Takari’s team of open source experts.
Acknowledgements
The authors of this book would like to acknowledge the customers of Takari for supporting sustainable open source development.