Maven feet

So we're working on this new project and decide to pick Maven as our build tool. Getting started wasn't too difficult - just download, add MAVEN_HOME to System's environment variables and modify path to include it's the Maven's bin directory. Voila - I typed mvn -version at a command line and was ready to go.

Creating the project shell from a template wasn't as easy. I decided to use archetypes. After updating software in Eclipse, and configuring the IDE to see Maven and SVN, I thought all I had to do to create a Maven module was follow the wizard. Wrong. The archetypes presented from a drop down list don't exist in repositories anymore.

So, after about an hour or so of fighting with Eclipse, I end up creating my project shell at the command line after using a slightly modified example I found online. I'm new to Eclipse so getting it to see a new snapshot of the code I need wasn't as intuitive as I had hoped.

Using mojo's was a different story - I plugged one into my pom.xml that deploys war files to JBoss and it worked without major issues. Yeah baby! I still haven't had any luck getting the mojo's start/stop goals to work right, but partial success was encouraging.

I guess everything worthwhile takes a little effort at the beginning. As a colleague contended that .NET is a lot easier to use as a framework for web applications, I secretly wondered what it would be like to not struggle with all of the plumbing just to get something going...neh.