Apache Maven is an open source build automation tool.
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CloudBees Continuous Integration
Score 8.6 out of 10
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CloudBees Continuous Integration (formerly the CloudBees Jenkins Platform) is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) solution that extends Jenkins. Developed for on-premise installations, CloudBees CI offers stable releases with monthly updates, as well as additional proprietary tools and enterprise features to enhance the manageability and security of Jenkins. CloudBees CI helps administrators manage growing installations due to ever-increasing teams, projects and jobs…
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.
For all continuous integration features like multi branch pipeline, continuous build, and deployment execution, highly customizable groovy scripting, well integration with most of repositories like SVN, GIT, etc. are some of the exceptional features which helps devOps related tasks a treat to work everyday. With some minor changes in agent configuration and handling of their configuration on master instances would reduce a lot of issues. Also, cache of maven handling on agents needs to be improved (though not related to tool but the CI pipelines). But, since this is a very mature and performant tool, we expect some out of the box functionalities to handle all such scenarios. Overall, the tool works wonders because of its highly customizable features.
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 seems very unreachable from my experience. They handle cases if developers are facing issues, support seems to be very limited. It's not like other tools in a market where every mail is being taken priority and responses are sent. We see a lack in this particular aspect when it comes to CloudBees Jenkins Platform.
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.
CloudBees Jenkins Support is on par with the other enterprise tools we're currently using. It has performed well enough that we've adopted the product and placed it in the critical path of our software delivery pipelines.
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.
