Apache Maven is an open source build automation tool.
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Hudson CI (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Oracle acquired and then supported Hudson Continuous Integration through 2016. Oracle no longer updates or supports Hudson. It was available free and open source under an MIT license, but it is no longer being developed, and is no longer available.
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.
Though it has a few setup issues, once you are done with setup it works like charm so one time setup issues won't bother. Reporting, version tracking, debugging everything is helpful and more clear and it reduces effort, in our scenario our QA team integrated their script with Hudson so that after every release it will get triggered automatically and developers will know if there is any major issue.
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 setup needs to be more user friendly, currently for first time users CI doesn't provide more guidelines.
JMeter tool can be integrated but it's not easy, user has to follow and do research before setup. A simpler way would help make the process more user friendly.
Selenium tool like JMeter can be integrated, if its Webservice it's easy but for UI automation integration not enough information is provided.
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.
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.
Oracle CI in terms of setup lags behind all above products, but then its use is also limited to release management so we can't really compare. Majority of organizations have dedicated team to help with CI Process so they take care of managing all jobs and setup.
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.
