For the impatient readers I just wanted to announce the release of the Guilder POC which can be found on its wiki: https://madplanet.com/trac/guilder which intends to be a replacement for Maven 2 taking the cool features of Maven 1 and 2 and also incorporating some of the cool Groovy stuff to give building projects its Groove back. For all others here is the a little bit longer story.

In December 2004 I first complained about Maven 2 and I never really started to embrace Maven 2 and still think that Maven 1 is the better solution. But now Maven 1 is dead and Maven 2 took over. Eventually I had to use it in my line of work and discovered even more problems. Because I don't think that Jelly is a good scripting language and never started to be used outside of Maven 1 in a bigger way I was looking for another scripting language that I could use as its replacement. Eventually someone pointed me to Groovy and the Maven 2 Groovy plugin. Even though I liked the idea of Groovy the Maven 2 Groovy plugin did not work for me. I did not want to have a plugin that execute Groovy code but that could be written in Groovy. I also did not succeed in mixing Ant statements with script code as I could do in Jelly which took most of the appeal of Groovy away and so a lot of time passed by.

Well, somehow I stumbled over Gant which is Ant in Groovy and I saw in an example what I was looking for. Using closures and a Builder class Groovy was able to provide code that would exactly do that. Here is a simple example:

ant.junit( printsummary: true, haltonfailure: true ) {
    if( classpathName != null ) {
        classpath( refid: classpathName )
    }
    ...
}

As you can see there is Ant's optional jUnit task intermingled with the check if the classpathName is not null and then it will be set a class path ref for the jUnit task. Beside the fact that I can mix and match Ant with Script Code this code also looks nicer because I don't have to deal with the closing tags and with other XML oddities. So nearly two months ago I started to think about a project that uses Groovy able to replace Maven 2 with scripted plugins. Now you might think that why replacing Maven 2 if I just could add the ability to create and deploy Groovy based plugins. The answer is that there is more that I don't like in Maven 2 than just the compiled Plugins and I hope that eventually all of these shortcomings are handled when this project is released. Here is a list of such features:

• Scripted Plugins based on Groovy (maybe with JIT compilation)
• Plugin Context that exposes the user interface but also the interactions with other Plugins
• POM is a Groovy Script as well (no more XML)
• POM Is completely flexible and its structure is defined by the used Plugins rather than the Project
• Transitive Dependency Management using Ivy
• Local POM and local Plugins (see maven.xml)
• Goals can be overwritten or another goal can be executed before or after another goal
• The project builds itself
• ...

Then it took me around 4 weeks to finally get a POC release worked out and finally last Tuesday I was able to announce the release of it on the LA-JUG meeting. After that I heard from many other build tools that are growing like wheat: Apache's Buildr, Gant (heard from it before), Gradle and Graven. After a short scan I don't think that Buildr is a good idea because the instructions are written in Ruby but that's maybe just me. Gant is good but its Ant in a Groovy coat and Graven is the same for Maven 2. Gradle seems to be the closest to what I want to do but I think that there are still major differences between the two when it comes to the idea of plugins and probably other areas.

If everything works out as expected I should be able to release the Alpha version in a month or two which should have a solid core and a few full blown plugins.

Have fun - Andy