Maven 4: Still XML. Still boring. Still Winning.
What's so ugly about Maven?
Oh, right, XML. The ancient language feared by the hipster cult of Gradle.
But let's be honest:
You don't write build files every day. You come back after months, forget everything, and now… you're debugging a Groovy poem.
Maven? You squint at the XML, and boom. Autocomplete, structure, sanity.
Maven 4? Still XML. Still boring. Still… Winning at automations.
Yes there are more features, and yes you can use other DSL's than XML with polyglot or any other extension like also before.
Something new and interesting could be the BOM packaging and requirement of java 17. You can always build lower stuff also with 17. It's simply Java.
My killer feature of Maven:
No copy-pasting the same config into 12 submodules and repositories.
All automated. All under my control.
No need to depend on the next third party cloud elf named like dependabot.
Or an SDK Man for switching java versions.
All I need is simply a JAR file and a build tool which does not disrupt me.
mvn wrapper:wrapper - Because of consistency, no jar binary inside my repo.
mvn dependency:tree - See who brought the uninvited guests.
mvn versions:update-properties - Auto-update without the bots.
mvn license:add-third-party - keep track of used licenses
mvn org.owasp:dependency-check-maven:check - Security without sacrifice.
[...]
Stop waiting for the next shiny thing, you can always contribute to any tool.
Start building. Or better automate it.
