maven, fedora.

I've been tipped that Maven is worth the learning curve.

I had a go, on Fedora 11. I can't wait for Fedora 12.

My first tip, is download and install locally: maven 2.2.1.
Install this into /usr/local/maven...

Use that in your Eclipse/NetBeans.

I'm on holiday for a few days... but I will post on how to get Eclipse and NetBeans building a distributable (all dependencies included) jar from the IDE when I return.

In conclusion: Maven is worth the learning curve.

UPDATE: After reflecting on actual use of Maven, I can add the following:

1. Because it manages the build process, the IDE does not manage the build process. This means that you reduce your dependence on a given IDE. The project I'm working on is now developed by NetBeans and Eclipse folks. At the same time.
2. Because it manages the build process, you are not dependent on IDE specific tools to build your distribution Jar. I like One-Jar but it is an extra dependency.
3. By allowing you to collect all dependent code in your own repository, Maven enables a new level of technical management to be applied across a project, group, division etc.
   

Tomcat6 on Fedora 11

I'm contemplating using Tomcat for my next project. I'm going to be developing on my Fedora 11 desktop.

I am new to this whole app server business and have spent this morning getting everything working. It shouldn't have taken that long, but it did.

My aim was to have some thing running on localhost which I could connect to and click about in. Compressed down in to a couple of steps I needed to do:

1. yum install tomcat6 tomcat6-webapps tomcat6-admin-webapps
2. edit /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml
   add the line:

   <user name="manager" password="tomcat_manager_secret" roles="manager"/>

3. service tomcat6 restart

tomcat6 is a basic package. to get something which you can click about with when you point your browser at localhost:8080, you need tomcat6-webapps. To get the manager component, you need tomcat6-admin-webapps.

This sounds obvious enough now that I've done it.