Introducing Takari and TEAM
This book documents the plugins and features available as the Takari Extensions for Apache Maven (TEAM) as well associated components and tools, that improve your usage of Maven. This introduction defines what the TEAM distribution is and introduces the company behind this new distribution.
What is TEAM?
TEAM stands for the Takari Extensions for Apache Maven. TEAM is a collection of supported Maven plugins and extensions to a core Apache Maven. It is made freely available by Takari. Takari is creating new releases every 30-60 days depending on the current development schedule.
TEAM was created to address several shortcomings in the “stock” Maven distribution and TEAM includes the following features beyond that of Maven:
Support for incremental build operations
An intelligent approach to the parallelization of Maven builds
An alternative to SNAPSHOT releases called Generations
Improved testing features and support
TEAM: Advanced Use Cases for Maven
While TEAM’s features are relevant to all Maven users, these features and plugins were designed to support development at scale - on projects with hundreds or thousands of developers. These advanced builds are often characterized by large networks of interdependent groups building and delivering a steady stream of software to production dealing with challenges that arise when an organization has a a large number of components with often conflicting release schedules.
On such large projects the key to success is agility, the pace with which new features can be implemented and additional releases can be delivered. These projects can rarely stop and wait for a formal release process that takes hours to complete. Individual developers are most productive when they can focus on incremental builds that don’t cause them to set aside hours or days for integration.
TEAM can be used by any Maven user, but TEAM was specifically designed for the needs of large software projects. The features added to TEAM cater to issues that arise when hundreds or thousands of developers are collaborating on fast-moving projects.
What is Takari?
Takari is a company founded by Jason van Zyl focused on creating software to manage component-based development and to support builds at scale. Takari’s developers bring multiple decades of experience building software systems to our customers. We know about creating and documenting large open source projects including Maven among others from years of actually running them.
Sustainable Open Source Development
Takari is committed to practicing sustainable open source development and building a community that understands exactly how open source developers and community members must be active participants to ensure the ongoing health of an open source project.
Integrity and Authenticity
As open source developers we believe in doing the right thing, in a reliable way and are committed to being genuine in our actions and reactions. Everyone from our developers to our executives understands that our actions must be consistent with our community.
Our Customers are Our Investors
Our customers fund our day-to-day operations by paying for our training, services and products. We answer to our customers so we can continue to focus our energy where it matters most — on creating high-quality, useful products for the community.
Community Support is Key
Staying involved and continuing to support the projects that are such a large part of where we came from is important to us. While we are focused on delivering quality software to our supporters we are also cognizant of the larger community.
Evolving Challenges - Builds at Scale
The efforts of Takari related to TEAM are influenced by the following industry trends:
Changing Technology - Changing Conventions
What worked 10 years ago may not be appropriate for today’s builds, but the core concepts that drove the creation of Maven are still valid today. Convention over configuration is even more appropriate now than it was then given the amount of variation introduced by polyglot development. With new languages, new production architectures, and a growing array of tools, Maven needs more than just a few new plugins to support new tools. It needs a comprehensive overhaul to allow for continued adaptation.
Incremental and parallel build improvements allow Maven to be used for a number of use-cases such as incremental compilation, incremental processing of Javascript resources, and other requirements which may not have been of primary concern in 2004.
TEAM updates the concept of SNAPSHOTS for complex projects and replaces it with Generations. This is an approach to tracking software releases and relating specific point-in-time releases to a commit or branch in a distributed version control system.
Over time TEAM will release updates to the core APIs and models of Maven to allow for easier integration with different languages, tools, and technology. It is Takari’s goal to make sure that TEAM’s regular releases can fill in the gaps between Maven’s far less frequent releases so that changes in technology can be quickly addressed by TEAM.
Faster Lifecycles: More Frequent Releases
When Maven was created we were aiming at projects that needed to conduct a weekly or monthly software release for a relatively well-defined project. When Maven was still new, the industry didn’t have projects beyond a certain level of complexity because the easy, component-based approach to development in Java hadn’t yet been enabled by Maven. Projects were more limited in scope then they are today. In addition to differences in scope, projects weren’t nearly as complex and interdependent as projects Takari supports in the field in 2014.
Today, we see large organizations with hundreds or thousands of developers. These organizations are building very complex, interdependent systems which depend upon Maven to facilitate both continuous integration and software releases. Where a company may only push to production once a month in 2004 or even less frequently, that same company expects to be able to push to production as often as possible even multiple times a day. This is the emerging reality of enterprise software development and Maven’s legacy approach to Releases and SNAPSHOTs does not lend itself to these, more iterative and agile workflows.
TEAM’s generations features as well as incremental and parallel builds are aimed squarely at created more timely and efficient builds for organizations that are looking to push to production frequently.
Installing TEAM
This chapter covers the installation process for the Takari Extensions for Apache Maven - TEAM.
Before you start installing TEAM there are a few things to establish. The following sections outline a few assumptions about the audience for this chapter as well as the prerequisites necessary for a successful installation.
Assumptions
One of the assumptions of TEAM is that you are already somewhat familiar with Maven terminology. You understand how to install Maven, and you also understand how to run Maven from the command-line. The good news is that, if you know how to do these two things, the installation process should be very easy for you.
If you are unfamiliar with Maven terminology, and if you have never installed Maven before, we suggest that you refer to the existing documentation or attend a Takari Maven training. In general, a familiarity with Maven will make the installation and setup process of TEAM very easy to understand.
Prerequisites
TEAM is designed and tested for
- Microsoft Windows 7 or higher
- Apple OSX 10.7 or higher and
- Modern Linux Distributions
with the Oracle Java Development Kit JDK version 7 installed. You can verify your JDK installation by running java -version which should result in an output similar to
$java -version java version "1.7.0_65" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_65-b17) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.65-b04, mixed mode)
Depending on your particular system and setup procedures, you may need administrative access to the machine you are installing TEAM on. If you following the instructions outlined below, you will certainly need administrative access, but if you understand what you are doing you may be able to get away with running TEAM from a directory in your home directory. We leave this customization to the reader.
Downloading
You TEAM can be downloaded from the Central Repository at https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven/io/takari/takari-team-maven/. This location contains all released versions. The TEAM distribution is available as both a GZip’d tar archive in each version specific folder following the Maven repository format’s naming convention for the archive. E.g. you can download version 0.9.0 of TEAM from
https://repo1.maven.apache.org/maven2/io/takari/takari-team-maven/0.9.0/takari-team-maven-0.9.0.tar.gz
resulting in a downloaded archive file name of takari-team-maven-0.9.0.tar.gz.
Installing
There are two ways to install TEAM on your computer. You can download a complete distribution of TEAM which includes Apache Maven. Alternatively you can run an installer that will turn a compatible installation of Apache Maven 3 into a functioning installation of TEAM. The second option was created for environment in which Maven is already installed to make it easier to migrate large groups of developers to the supported TEAM distribution.
Installing a TEAM Distribution
Installing the TEAM distribution is easy, and if you are familiar with installing Maven you’ll notice the similarities. Once you have downloaded the archive extract it with a command line tool like ‘tar’ or one of the many available archive management applications for your operating system.
tar xvzf takari-team-maven-1.0.0.tar.gz
Successful extraction will create a directory with the same name as the archive file, omitting the extension.
takari-team-maven-1.0.0
As a next step you need to move this directory to a suitable location. The only requirements is that the user that will run TEAM has read access to the path.
We suggest to follow the operating system specific recommendations e.g. on Linux or OSX install TEAM into /opt or /usr/local and avoid path names containing spaces such as Program Files.
/opt/takari-team-maven-1.0.0 C:\tools\takari-team-maven-1.0.0
The next steps should be just as familiar from a standard Maven installation as the simple archive extraction - create a M2_HOME environment variable that points to the folder you just created and add M2_HOME/bin to the PATH.
On Linux or OSX you can configure this e.g., in your ~/.profile file with
export M2_HOME=/opt/takari-team-maven-1.0.0 export PATH=M2_HOME/bin:$PATH
On Windows you typically configure this via the user interface as a system environment variable. On the command line you can use the set command:
set M2_HOME=c:\tools\takari-team-maven-1.0.0
Note that the usage of the environment variable is done via %M2_HOME% as compared to $M2_HOME, that the delimiter in the path definition is a semicolon and the path separator is a backslash so your PATH modification will look similar to
%M2_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
Upgrading an Existing Apache Maven Installation
To upgrade an existing Apache Maven installation….
mvn team:install or whatever
Verifying your TEAM Installation
Once you have installed the TEAM distribution, you should verify your setup by running mvn -v or mvn --version, which should display the TEAM version:
$ mvn -v Takari Extensions for Apache Maven (TEAM) 0.9.1-SNAPSHOT (72d4cce; 2014-10-14T11:12:43-07:00) Including: --> Apache Maven: 3.2.4-SNAPSHOT --> Smart Builder: 0.3.0 --> Concurrent Safe Local Repository: 0.10.4 --> OkHttp Aether Connector: 0.13.1 --> Logback with Colour Support: 1.0.7 --> Incremental Build Support: 0.9.0+ http://takari.io/team Maven home: /opt/tools/takari-team-maven-0.9.1-SNAPSHOT Java version: 1.7.0_65, vendor: Oracle Corporation Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_65.jdk/Contents/Home/jre Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8 OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.8.5", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"
The same output will be created with the -V or --show-version parameters. It details the version of TEAM as well as the components of it e.g. Apache Maven, Smart Builder and others.
Eclipse Support for TEAM
Any TEAM plugins and components needed for development with Eclipse and M2e are setup to be automatically installed. Alternatively you can manually install the components.