Apache Maven 3 Cookbook

Agile Team Collaboration
How it works...
While setting up the Nexus repository and configuring Apache Maven is complete, one critical
aspect still remains. Nexus needs to be installed on the LAN so that everyone in the team can
access it.
Ideally, it should not reside on a development machine. A dedicated box, accessible on the
LAN will be perfect. Setting up a LAN is obviously beyond the scope of this recipe. However,
chances are that you are already on a LAN. In such a case, a preferred repository URL would
be something like:
http:///nexus-webapp-1.8.0/content/
repositories/TestRepository/
Out of all the repository managers available, Nexus is recommended because it is
developed by Sonatype; which includes many core developers from Apache Maven.
Hence, interoperability with various versions of Apache Maven is better supported.
Repository managers are generally recommended, as they prevent the trouble of each
developer uniquely downloading the same dependencies over and over again. Only a single
download is required, and once downloaded, they are available to everyone in the team or
organization. In large organizations with multiple projects, this ends up saving considerable
bandwidth, and more importantly, developer time.
Another advantage is that internal projects / artifacts can be deployed onto the team /
organizational repository and each developer can access internal dependencies from the
repository instead of having to clone and locally build the project.
Performing continuous integration with
Hudson
In Chapter 2, Software Engineering Techniques, we saw how our project builds could be
automated in the Build automation section. Now that we can build and test our project
with a single command, the question of how often this should be done arises.
"Ship It!" by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr. says:
"Ideally, you will rebuild every time the code changes. That way you'll know
immediately if any change broke your build."
Sure, programmers always try and do it, but how often have you pulled an update from the
SCM and forgotten to build before committing your code? To avoid this occurrence, builds can
be triggered each time code is committed into the SCM. Such a setup is known as continuous
integration. It has become extremely popular and is extremely effective for small and large
teams working in an Agile environment.
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