TVOM: Time Value of Money

TVOM is the elephant in the living room of software development.

Tool vendors create Value expressed as Time, and then comes their own tradeoff - a sucking sound that is supposed to be music to the developer's ears. If only that tradeoff was really music.

Decided On Ivy Instead Of Maven

Spent the last couple of days trying to set up an implementation of ant's ivy. This team is going to ant, but no way will they move to maven. So Ivy is the natural companion, I figured.

OK, couple of days is an exaggeration. I spent the last couple of days studying and reading all about it between interruptions, either way it took all my available extra time.

Grails gets selected for our 2008 project !

Funny thing that Grails went from being the red-headed step child to favored son here at work, in a very short couple of months.

Came about because we had a few days to do R&D in November, and with that little amount of time I couldn't risk a failed project. So I wrote a quickie persistence app for our Flex prototype in Grails, even though I had never done a Grails project in my life.

Maven Sucks.

You might think that was a silly thing for a Maven evangelist to say, but compare me to any other evangelist and it's easy to see the similarities. If I was an evangelist for the Foo Religion I would be saying things like "sure it's a challenge to be a Fooist but the benefits are Footernity" or something like that. I wouldn't be saying it had no cost. It sucks to be a Fooist, people throw darts at me and all kinds of nasty things happen.

It's a lot easier to explain Maven in 15 seconds, but so far everyone tries to explain Maven in 15 hours instead. With that version, even 15 hours might not be enough....

Here is the 15 second version:

Maven treats a build script as an exception, compared to Ant or Gant or Make or shell scripts which treat a build script as a prescription.

In Maven, the only thing you write is the part that is different from a standard build. Having that standard build is the essence, not your script.

So let's review:

If you want to catch someone losing their mind to the swirl of emotions and setting aside facts altogether, just introduce the topic of Maven vs Ant to any group of java developers who knows a little about either.

You Can't Make Me

The first concern of course is the issue of force. Maven is free as in free beer, but it ain't free as in freedom. It's all about restricting people, forcing them down a predictable and consistent path.

If you aren't a java programmer, this won't make any sense to you but there is this amazing tool that java programmers use >  Maven

<maven_rant>

I have been a Maven pioneer for years

I have been a Maven evangelist for years, brought it into several organizations.

I have trained many people, done several very well attended presentations, published multiple online sites just about Maven.

As a developer, how much time do I spend adding value, and how much time maintaining infrastructure ?

Sometimes my estimate goes like this

• Adding Value: 20% of my time
• Maintaining Infrastructure 80% of my time

Really I have no idea, but sometimes it seems like it really is lopsided.