Creating a new maven project: npdsamds

I have created a new maven project to hold the service end of the npds-to-amds code, and it is appropriately named npdsamds. It will essentially be a gridified version of the npds service that should be served up via a globus container (Thus requiring security and all that jazz).

Maven solves many worlds of hurt with its dependency management, and the repositories where you can store jars so that others may use them. It also makes other tools pale in comparison and seem much more annoying.

One of them is SVN, which for some reason is "old" on my copy of ubuntu and cannot be easily upgraded using the standard ubuntu tools. Thus, whenever I try and add new projects to the SVN repository or move files, I always have to create new folders and re-check-out the code because otherwise the version of subclipse I use with (you guessed it) eclipse touches the svn special secret hidden files and makes it so that lowly command-line subversion is eschewed from adding the files. I also have to do this every time that subclipse botches something.

The other tool is ant. Don't get me wrong, maven /uses/ ant. But maven is to ant as a chocolate cake is to baker's chocolate. The combination maven of which ant is a part, is much better than the bitter chunks of ant by itself. Ant offers all sorts of commands that rely on all sorts of duck-aligning and basically anyone who writes an ant script also has to write a very long doc about what each part of the script can do and how to invoke it. Maven, you can usually just tell someone "type 'mvn package'" and it will produce the thingy they need, and it is a LOT easier for the person who coded the stuff inside the maven package to set up the project that way.

Don't get me wrong, both tools are very powerful and useful in their own right. I just have a small personal bias in that maven hasn't made me curse it's name yet.
But, we might write a plugin that allows maven to build globus services. So, I'm sure I will be cursing it's name soon enough.