Maven 3.0 final: First impressions

I was impatiently waiting for Maven 3.0 for while now, and was very happy to read that the final release is available now. I did some quick tests with the final using a pretty large Maven 2.x project. It contains of 60+ modules and uses all sorts of plugins (e.g. ant, buildnumber, xmlbeans, jaxb, assembly, weblogic, jar, ear, all sorts of reporting plugins and of course all the standard ones). After switching the build process from Maven 2.2.1 to Maven 3.0 the normal lifecycle ran without any problems. I noticed, as with the RCs before, that Maven 3 is much less noisy than 2.2.1. I like that. The build time was about the same a before (about 13 minutes on my machine). As soon as I activated the new parallel build feature (mvn -T4 clean install) the build time reduced to about 9:30min. Cool! However, Maven complains that some of the plugins I use are not yet thread safe. The build completed without error anyhow, but I probably will have to check for plugin updates during the next weeks.

I did not yet try to run the site lifecycle. The site generation in Maven 3 has been completely reworked and is not compatible with Maven 2.x. To make this work, I will have to rework my POMs and use the new versions of the site plugin.

Summary: Maven 3.0 looks good. The internals of Maven 3 have more or less been completely refactored, so the high degree of backward compatibility is quite impressive. Of course, one could argue that Maven 3 offers not enough new user-visible features to justify a new major release. But in my opinion the refactored architecture and code base is much more important than new features.