Apache Maven is an open source build automation tool.
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BMC AMI DevX
Score 9.3 out of 10
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An enterprise ready, low-code Git-based DevOps toolchain that enables all developers to connect, transform and modernize mainframe application with CI/CD automation, integrated developer environments (IDE), AI/ML-based application performance monitoring and visualization dashboards, and automated testing.
Maven is great if you have an application with a lot of third-party dependencies and don’t want each developer to keep track of where the dependency can be downloaded. It’s also a great way to make it easy for a new developer to be able to build the application. It’s less suitable for simple projects without any third-party dependencies.
I'm not sure what scenario it would not be suitable for. I have it up all day, though I do use the mainframe emulator to go back to the old 'green screen'. We have tools that we must use there. There is very little I can't do on the workbench. I'm trying to get some of our new developers to use it, as when I'm using it and talking to them on the phone, they don't know what I'm talking about.
Code Pipeline: integration of MF and non-MF type of object (COBOL, Java, zosconnect...). Deployment of objects coming from inside and outside the mainframe in the same way.
Workbench for Eclipse: a must-have for working with Code Pipeline and the mainframe in the development context.
Workbench for VS Code: They started developing VSCode, and the plugin works very well. There are a lot of things to add, but it's still very good. Young developers like it!
Maven provides a very rigid model that makes customization tedious and sometimes impossible. While this can make it easier to understand any given Maven build, as long as you don’t have any special requirements, it also makes it unsuitable for many automation problems.
Maven has few, built-in dependency scopes, which forces awkward module architectures in common scenarios like using test fixtures or code generation. There is no separation between unit and integration tests
The overall usability of Apache Maven is very good to us. We were able to incorporate it into our company's build process pretty quickly. We deployed it to multiple teams throughout the entire enterprise. We got good feedback from our developers stating that Apache Maven has simplified their build process. It also allowed to to standardize the build process for the entire enterprise, thus ensure that each development team is using the same, consistent process to build code.
I can't speak to the support, as I've never had issues. Apache Maven "just works," and errors were user errors or local nexus errors. Apache Maven is a great build/dependency management tool. I give it a 9/10 because occasionally the error message don't immediately indicate a solution...but again, those errors were always user or configuration errors, and the Maven documentation is extensive, so I don't find fault in Maven, but in its users.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Ant, Maven's opposing framework, is often a point of comparison. Although Ant does not require formal conventions, it is procedural in the sense that you must tell Ant exactly what to do and when. It also lacks a lifecycle, along with goal definition and dependencies. Maven, on the other hand, requires less work as it knows exactly where your source code is as long as the pom.xml file is generated.
Optim is more user friendly in how it operates, in my opinion. It's less obtuse to figure out how to extract and mask the data required compared to File-AID. Further, Optim is easier to gather related tables, by far. I do prefer using File-AID via the Topaz GUI much more than using Optim via its GUI. Finally, I personally believe that File-AID is significantly faster to run than Optim - this could be a configuration issue.
Apache Maven is an open source product from the Apache Software Foundation. Being free to use without any licensing constraints, we've been very happy with this product thus far.
The software build and packaging times for our applications have improved greatly since our use of this tool.
I can debug (expeditor) much faster and more efficiently. In fact, I was asked yesterday to run their job through Workbench Expeditor. I can also view data movement much better.
Code analysis lets me give a quicker explanation of what a program may do, as it provides a graphical interface showing processing and data movement.
