This time I will write about Maven, which – as Monika already revealed – we utilize to generate (and publish) a simple documentation page. I do see Maven as a mean to conserve and reproduce a process such as building the application and packaging it. Someone who is new to “all this” will most probably forget about byte-code enriching, converting charsets or simply running tests and integration tests. By Maven a “mvn package” is as easy to remember as it preserves the convenience to not forget about running one of the steps mentioned above.
And, should the process be extended no present developer will even have the opportunity to omit eventual new steps; should one go his knowledge does not get lost.

An widely used alternative is Ant. We have decided not to use it primarily as it lacks the ability to resolve and download dependencies, which our current tool is able to. (See Ivy for Ant as dependency manager downloading from Maven repositories.)
By the time I wrote my thesis I have had to spend about a week to dig through qKAI’s dependencies, figure out which package requires another and how to update the clique in case of the errors I experienced.

Today we can even introduce new tools such as PMD or JDepend without burdening someone with installation, configuration or familiarization. A quick “notice the new reports on our page” at the distribution list suffices.

How we managed to automatically provide modified third party code and how we incorporated Maven with continuous integration is another topic. Such as enforcing coding styles and what we used Subversion’s scripts for. So, stay tuned.

Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information. (http://maven.apache.org/)

With Maven we got a nice project documentation now – available under http://docs.qkai.org. Especially the API section is work in progress and will be enhanced by and by.