Thursday 16 December 2010

Maven: "mvn archetype:generate" gives you 358 archetypes to choose from - too much of a good thing??

Just typed

maven archetype:generate

and I get a long long long list that goes up to...


349: remote -> nexus-plugin-archetype (-)
350: remote -> spring-osgi-bundle-archetype (Spring OSGi Maven2 Archetype)
351: remote -> spring-ws-archetype (Spring Web Services Maven2 Archetype.)
352: remote -> trails-archetype (-)
353: remote -> trails-secure-archetype (-)
354: remote -> tynamo-archetype (-)
355: remote -> wicket-scala-archetype (Basic setup for a project that
combines Scala and Wicket,
depending on the Wicket-Scala project. Includes an example Specs
test.)
356: remote -> wikbook.archetype (-)
357: remote -> circumflex-archetype (-)
358: remote -> javg-minimal-archetype (-)
Choose a number: 97:


358 archetypes??? At least it means a lot of projects have adopted
maven. But how usable is this?

Shouldn't we have something like a menu instead?

2 comments:

Ed said...

Count yourself lucky, it is giving me 607 !!!!
This is the type of thing that makes me really detest maven. Convention over configuration? You have to *know* all about *everything* before you can understand *anything*.

krangsquared said...

It's kinda like Eclipse, in the sense that you never get this consistently good user experience. The quality of Eclipse and Maven plugins seem to be all over the place.

Still wouldn't go back to Ant though! :P