Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I recommend JRebel for Java developers, it will remove the time needed for redeployment, it will increase the focus on the task at hand (without being distracted by the redeployment) and will make them happier. I recommend JRebel for Java Development Managers, they should purchase this for their teams - it will increase productivity, decrease the product's time to market, and it will save money for the company. The ROI can be calculated upfront and presented to higher level management for approving this, if needed.
Read full review Pros If you are building in the Java ecosystem, then Maven definitely has the biggest repository of artifacts needed for such projects. It has a very simple to use extendable architecture. Everything is configurable through the Pom.xml file which is very simple to follow. Read full review Deploys all layout changes consistently (when Instant Run was initially available, you couldn't tell if the change you made to a layout was actually being tested or not). Doesn't require a full build as often as Instant Run when changing code. Works with compile time annotation libraries like Realm, etc. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review It worked great, no big cons Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Performance The performance of JRebel is great. It is enabling the Java team to do hot re-deployments and it has to be transparent and fast for the user, otherwise the whole purpose of reducing wasted time with re-deployments doesn't make sense. Also the User Interface for License Server management and analytics loads fast and the navigation through pages is quick.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Hot code swapping doesn't have many players...it's mainly JRebel. We use JRebel a lot in our backend code development where it minimizes our development cycle (20min down to 30sec). For Android, the competitor is Android Studio's Instant Run which works fairly well now. For smaller apps, Instant Run is faster deploying but needs more full builds. With JRebel, you hardly ever need to do a full build.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review It sped up the developing time, and time is money for the company. Read full review ScreenShots