About SpringSource's marketing

Look what i just got today:

from Kylie Clement 
to me
date Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:19 AM
subject SpringSource Application Platform
 
Erick,

Thank you for your interest in SpringSource Application Platform, an excellent alternative to J2EE application servers.

Are you available Thursday or Friday of this week for a telephone conversation?  I would like to understand your requirements in detail
and answer any questions you may have.

Regards,
Kylie

Kylie Clement
Regional Sales Manager
SpringSource, Inc.
1875 South Grant Drive, Suite 650
San Mateo, CA 94402

This happened after I registered for a webcast about the newly released Spring Application Platform. I have given my information to the big boys before (IBM, Oracle, etc etc) and never got an email as intrusive as this before.
Anyway, being consistent with the inversion of control pattern, my answer is: No Mr Clement, do not call me; I'll call you if I ever need your help. And no, you will not be able to understand my requirements in a phone call as not even I am sure of what they are.

maven-js-plugin

Wao,
I was blown away by the ease of use of this maven plugin.
Just add it to your pom.xml lie this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.mobilvox.ossi.mojo</groupId>

  <artifactId>maven-js-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.3.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <mergeWarFiles>true</mergeWarFiles>

    <classifier>js-compressed</classifier>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

And then in the maven output, during the package phase, you get to see something like this:

[info] JavaScript file compression complete.
[info] Size of JavaScript files after compression: 1612632 bytes
[info] Compression ratio: 27.103024264908303%
[info] Creating WAR: mywar.war with compressed JavaScript

So there you go, another reason to love maven.

Maven, love it, hate it, love it, hate it, ......

Lately I've been doing lots of maven stuff.
I just released a new version of the web app I am working on and this version is going to production. Releases always are maven intensive tasks (for maven based build systems obviously), package the app, make sure data population scripts and schema creation ones are all good, deploy to new environment, run tests against it to ensure everything is ok, etc etc.
Tweaking maven to behave appropriately can sometimes be frustrating although, in this opportunity, I have to say that almost everything went smoothly.
One thing that I find tricky is the build profiles. I am obsessive with DRYing every single line of code i write and profiles do not make it easy in this regard. A feature I would love for maven to have is the ability to activate a profile from within another profile.
For example, I want to have a profile called mysql that defines the dependency on mysql, plus properties such as driver class name, hibernate dialect class name etc. I want to have another profile to define an environment, say nigthly as an example. Nightly consists of a server running an instance of tomcat to which I want maven to deploy the app every night and, a mysql server instance which will host the app's DB.
I don't wanna say mvn deploy -P nightly,mysql; instead I just wanna say mvn deploy -P nightly and the nightly knows to activate the mysql profile.
Overall I like maven and it is a very lively project with a very active comunity. I also like the fact that it has many detractors as this works in favor of making it better. I do wish it was released more often though.