Thursday, February 15, 2007

Quality of Maven integration becomes decisive for OSS adoption - good bye Axis

Today I realised, how important it became for any open-source project to play nicely with the Maven repository and to get its dependencies right in its pom's .
When I had to whip up a web-service client yesterday, I started out trying Axis-2 since I knew the server impl was bases on Axis. Quickly I had to decide to either start debugging their maven-plugins dependencies (obviously wsdl4j was lost somhow), or to try something different (XFire). What I definitely not wanted was to clutter my build with Ant or, worse, CLI calls. I quickly tried XFire, its Maven plugin worked out of the box - even the library itself was a pleasant surprise (easy to use, nice Jaxb-bindings, clean generated code).

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