As many of you will have noticed I have over the last while been moving my open source efforts to Apache and Codehaus centering around the Maven build system.

It struck me over my time coding in this environment that although many great development tools are available there can be a large overhead setting up the individual components and getting the development lifecycle set up. Although it is an obvious area ripe for improvement there are no freely available open source projects that seem to agree with this view. Therefore I decided (with the help of some great Maven developers) that we needed to address this.

In steps “Maven Enterprise”. I am terrible with words all round, so I will let Jason VanZyl the maven lead developer introduce it for me:

Today a nice surprise for Maven users was checked into the Maven Sandbox. Lately Andy Williams and I have been throwing around the idea of creating an enterprise distribution for Maven users in which the community can participate. I was involved in the creation of Maestro, the original Maven distribution, but I am no longer working at Mergere. Though I could gain access to the sources, wiki, and issue tracker of Maestro, I would rather support the efforts of people like Andy and a project like Maven Enterprise that is open. Why do I think Maven Enterprise has a better chance of satisfying the needs of enterprise users?

• Maven Enterprise will be open. The SVN repository is fully visible, the issue tracker is fully visible, and the wiki is fully visible. This means users can actually see what’s going on between releases, participate, and even contribute.
• Maven Enterprise will be supportable. I think at least a few enterprises will get involved and that will provide a better support base then any one company can provide.
• Maven Enterprise is extensible. You’ll be able to easily add components and applications to Maven Enterprise for your own internal needs, or commercial purposes. Maven Enterprise in an extended form is already in production. The core system should be available for anyone to augment for whatever purpose without having to wait for source drops.

So there you go – if you would like to read more see Jason’s official announcement.

Happy building.