Grails and Maven rants

Grails: Lately I’ve been delving into the Grails project. Grails is something like Ruby on Rails but for the Java world. It uses the Groovy language, a dynamic language similar to Ruby but with Java syntax and a tight integration into the Java VM. Groovy brings those great features like Closures to Java developers. Since I can’t deny 10 years of Java experience I’m somewhat dran to this solution, rather than to Rails. Now for those you would like to delve into Grails, there is a free book available at InfoQ. It might help you understand it’s potential which to a great degree comes from the underlying Groovy. Maven: Maven is a project management tool for Java projects. It supports building projects just like Ant but is supposed to go much further. It allows you to specify dependencies to other projects or 3rd party libraries. It also build a nice web site for you containing build stats, Javadoc and Documentation. Until now I’m using Ant for building my projects. I have used Maven 1.0 for the server part of our Net-Herald application. What I do not like in the Maven approach is that all artefacts (3rd party libs, generated libs from own projects) live in a repository. If a dependency is not met, Maven tries to fetch it from a mirror. This works most of the time for open source libs, but of course must fail if you depend on commercial or your own libs. Anyway I like my dependencies to be in Subversion along with the source. Some people say this is wrong. But for me I just know where all the stuff is… But still I wanna give a new try to Maven. And today I found this free Maven book online at DevZuz. So mayve you find those books helpful. Tell me what you think regarding Build management. This is an area where I think a lot can be improved- especially in my case :)