There are about 89 fixes and improvements, particularly including:

• Artifact Uploads from the Web Interface
• RSS
• Virtual Repositories
• Timeouts for remote proxies
• New Runtime Bundle based on Jetty 6.1 and Java Service Wrapper
• Apache Jackrabbit WebDAV Servlet
• Architecture changed to Spring

You can see more in the full release notes or download it from the site.

It’s a drop-in upgrade, so try it out!

The conference itself was very well attended, so it is great to see that level of interest in open source in the Philippines, and to meet a number of people involved in communities there. I hope that events like this are an encouragement to grow both individual and commercial involvement in open source in the region.

There were a number of technology-specific sessions as well, and I enjoyed catching Webtide’s Greg Wilkins giving an overview of Jetty and Deng Ching giving an overview Maven, Archiva and Continuum. Also presenting from Exist were Ludwig (Pentaho) and Erle (Eclipse plugin development), and though I was unfortunately only able to catch the last portions of each talk I’m reliably informed they went well.

I spoke there about Open Source Communities, and chose to discuss the model used at the Apache Software Foundation, and to share a few of my opinions on why it works so well, when it does. It was actually billed as a panel, sharing a time slot with two other speakers. Rather than the usual back and forth discussion, it was set up as a series of 15 minute speaking slots followed by a joint Q & A. My talk went well despite the usual hiccups with video, microphones and a partially failed attempt to introduce myself in Tagalog.

There were a number of good questions asked in our segment. The most interesting, and hardest, was the question of whether there was a challenge for Filipinos to get involved in open source projects coming from a predominantly non-confrontational culture. This can be a real difficulty, particularly as many projects are based around decision-making structures that involve public disagreement. However, my belief is that in a meritocratic open source community, respect built on accumulated merit should balance this out - and certainly in my experience, Pinoy culture emphasises respect and a non-egocentric demeanour, which makes a very valuable addition to the dynamics of an open source community.

Of course, in reality, communities are never perfect, and it comes down to individual personalities. Speaking more generally, I’d always encourage anyone to participate when they feel they have something useful to offer. If they are unable, or uncomfortable, to do that in a particular project, they have the choice to try and change it from within, or invest energy elsewhere. It’s the responsibility of the members of a project themselves to ensure they do not have any invisible barriers to participation for contributors who could make very valuable technical contributions - and it is their loss otherwise. After all, the "open" in open source is about more than just the code!

Anyway, no trip to Cebu is complete without discussing the food. We ate at a couple of old favourites there, but another stand out was a small group of us getting all-you-can-eat Japanese. I’m still recovering 3 weeks later! Good times.

I value that projects are not islands. I also value that multiple projects are allowed in the same space allowing each to innovate, and for collaboration to occur on more natural rather than imposed terms. I value that there are a not a great number of rules and policies, but that there are enough to ensure the fundamental principles of the Foundation are unchanging.

I value that the ASF focuses on enabling, whether that be by bringing people together from across the world, by enabling others to build solutions on top of ASF projects through the Apache License, or by enabling change, such as the work in the JCP.

I value most the opportunity to work with, and meet in person, great people.

I’m a "true believer" in the concept of community before code. I don’t believe that means discussing instead of doing - but rather doing something openly, and being inclusive of developers, contributors, and users alike to seek the best solutions. I particularly dislike artificial barriers to openness. I believe open communities not only mature faster, but are generally more fun to be around.

Of course, not everyone has the same opinion, and it doesn’t always work out that way - but as an individual, it is how I try to guide my participation.

Gee, I wish someone had told me, considering I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time on it again recently.

I see daily postings on either the love or hate of Maven, mostly containing no really new insight. At the risk of taking the bait, there were two reasons I thought this one was worth responding to.

Firstly - the title. Sensationalist attempt at traffic? It could be. But it raises the interesting question of where Maven is going. On the one hand, Maven’s core has been stable and usable by a large number of people for a long time (coming up on 3 years now). It’s not perfect, but it is certainly more than good enough to be the tool of choice for many developers. Because of that, much of the effort has been going into the plugins steadily over time, and into supporting infrastructure (there are now 3 alternatives for repository managers, countless continuous integration servers that support it directly, and solid integration options for all major Java IDEs). Most of the proposed alternatives to Maven build on top of infrastructure intended for Maven. These are clear signs it is not going "away" any time soon.

But on the other hand, development on Maven itself has been frustratingly slow (said as both a developer and a user). Between attention to other tools and the sufficient stability and wide adoption of the 2.0.x series, new releases have been a long time coming. This is, however, a good time to ask the question of where Maven is going, because there are signs that things are turning around.

I recently gave a talk about open source communities and highlighted the importance of both activity and diversity in making progress. Over the last 6 months we’ve seen bursts by individuals (including myself) that have either not landed in the mainstream development, or have but have not been pushing towards a release. But in the last few weeks, as some focus has been given to isolating a milestone release to potential regressions from 2.0.x and that integration tests are running under various set ups, there are positive signs that the elusive first release is coming. If a group of people can continue working together, momentum will build and it will be out in short order. 

In my opinion, a first milestone release will be the trigger for momentum towards a high quality, and much-improved, release of Maven that starts to address some of the long known practical issues that people commonly bump up against. It will certainly lay a platform for more important changes. But even without many flashy new features, Maven 2.1 will be a worthwhile upgrade. We’ve already seen efforts in error reporting, build determinism, plugin classloading, memory handling and embedding - and I hope this trend continues as we attempt to make Maven easier to use in more places and easier to fix when things go wrong. 

Tangential to the core itself, we’ve seen a lot of work by a group of developers in pushing the site generation tools into new releases and the steady elimination of issues. In the transport layer - particularly around deployment, work was done to eliminate most known bugs.

I hope this is good news for the blog author, who is a self-professed fan of Maven. In the end, the basis for his post was a simple thing, that it lacks flexibility. This is one of the older arguments surrounding Maven, and again here it was seen his problem could be addressed by a simple and widely available plugin. This is often the case.

However there is also something to the point that he raised about new languages on the JVM, and the incoming stream of new build tools that utilise a lot of Maven concepts and infrastructure while remaining based in scripting languages that merits a closer look. I will save this second point for a follow up post.

I know a few people will be disappointed to hear me say it, but it seems Maven isn’t going away just yet. 

Update: while I had this draft open, I see Brian has responded as well. It seems the author knows how to push the buttons of the Maven developers

Ok, so I appreciate that you acknowledged the receipt of my request, and that you responded in a way that didn’t sound like a standard reply, and that you didn’t just cut-and-paste it.

But if you’re going to use a standard reply, try not to make it look so obvious…

I just hope Lane read the request history better than Crystal Then again, maybe I now have two feature requests open - double my chances!

• The Eclipse Integration for Apache Maven (IAM)
• The m2eclipse Project

With both projects growing in maturity every day and each with their own unique features and focus, Maven users should look forward to two good choices and (hopefully healthy!) competition for some time to come.

I now use IAM’s seed project, q4e, every day without any issues - in fact, better Maven support is one of the reasons I switched to Eclipse from IDEA as my primary IDE. I find that the way I work at this point in time, switching regularly between a number of open source projects, that this became one of the most important features for me. Apart from seamlessly handling the changes to the POM in the background, the WTP support has been a great win for me.

During the trip, I was able to attend the PSIA (Philippine Software Industry Association) General Meeting in Makati. It was a bigger than expected turn out, and a good night out. It was interesting to see what else is going on there. I was even able to play a small role, being guest judge for a contest (based on submissions of business ideas for building intellectual property).

There were a number of presentations during the evening. Deng was one, presenting a case study on the Apache Software Foundation and it’s licensing model, which she recently blogged about.

What Deng was too modest to mention in her blog was that she was also the recipient of the PSIA Honor Award during the evening. 

The award was to recognise her achievement in being the first Filipina chair of a project at the ASF. While this is admittedly a strange thing to give an award for (it’s much more of a responsibility than a privilege!), the point was made during the presentation that Apache is a meritocracy, and there is no doubt that Deng has shown merit in her time there. Knowing Deng and the responsibility, respect and humility with which she has taken on the position makes it something worth recognising.

That sort of accolade doesn’t come along every day, so I thought it was worth a plug. Congratulations Deng!

It was certainly encouraging to me to see the organisation recognising contributions to open source at that level. Even more importantly, they gave the stage to Deng to describe to people of influence in the software industry there why they should be looking at both using and producing open source, and why Apache’s license and community development model is a good choice in doing so.

Finally, the night ended with networking, drinks, and Rock Band. After a rendition of Enter Sandman, and a compulsion to sing Australian music by Jet, I decided I should really stick to the instruments and not the vocals in public from now on.

Here are a few pictures from the evening:

The project continues to grow - we’ve just added our first committer as a standalone project (welcome, James!). Another release is also now just around the corner with much improved HTTP and WebDAV support, performance and memory improvements, and popular feature requests such as RSS and repository groups are just being rounded out.

Igo presented the first subject, walking through source control in general and then the basics of setting up and using a Subversion repository. Deng presented the after-lunch shift, teaching the basics of Maven. Nap and I came along for tech support and heckling, respectively 

I learned a few things myself on the day. Firstly, a number of Tagalog words that describe building software . What was also interesting was hearing someone else teach Maven. Deng, of course, did a superb job of giving an introduction to what Maven is all about. Teaching it myself is one thing - and it often becomes obvious what new users struggle with - but watching in the 3rd person makes it even more acute. Maven is certainly making building software easier - but it still needs to get even easier.

I have to admit that I’ve found it cool to have this project which started as a hobby for me now being taught in technical schools halfway across the world. Considering the extent of source control I was taught about in university was one assignment using SCCS, and that we only occasionally built using a makefile, students today have a huge advantage in getting started.

I’ve posted a few photos on flickr of the day:

Check out the full release notes, and download it.

Planning is now under way for the next release - so now is a great time to vote for your high priority issues, submit an integration test or create a patch and get involved!