Maven2 Landskape - Developers view

So Maven Dependency Overview Plugin has been created.
Maven has it's ups and downs as any project.

Here is a list of things that made it harder than needed to create a report plugin:

• Documentation is hard to get.
  Try searching Maven2 Plugin Development. You can find some basic information but soon you'll run into undocumented features.
  Most of a time while viewing documentation I felt like someone wrote it because he/she was forced to do it.
  Most valuable resource for me where:
• MAVENUSER
• Mini Guides
  
• Poor API documentation.
  There is a plugin (maven-docck-plugin) designed to force proper documentation, unfortunately some plugins even one shipped with Maven are not using it.
• Unstable API.
  take a look at dependencies of maven-reporting-impl. It depends on doxia-core and doxia-site-renderer both are version 1.0-alpha-7, not documented.

Good luck developing Maven plugins, you'll need it, but it's rewarding.

I'll try to write integration test for Maven Dependency Overview Plugin, hope it is going to be as much fun as developing plugin by itself.

I'll keep you posted.

Maven Dependency Overview

Maven Dependency Overview

Since I started working with Maven2 I always wanted to have a plug-in that would graph dependency.


For last few days I've been spending part of my free time on maven-overview-plugin.

And here it is in quite usable state.

You can include report with Dependency Overview, you can use it from command line, you can do some basic configuration.

To prove that it is actually useful I wrote short story of it's use: DependencyCleanUpShortStory.

Feel free to use it it is OS Licence.