Maven and Ivy

We experimented a few years ago using Apache Maven to manage the Java libraries that mondrian depends on. Maven looked great on paper, but it was tricky to set up, and since simplicity was the goal in the first place, we gave up.

Since then Maven2 has been released. Version 2 has a new architecture and is by all accounts a great improvement. I have recently been using Maven for a project with a lot of dependencies on other projects and it helps a lot. It imposes a structure on the dependencies by forcing you to name and version your projects in a certain way, and provides a central repository to put them in. You can provide local repositories for projects only you or your project team are using.

Still, Maven seems to be a one-trick pony, even though it's a great trick. Maven generates distributions, javadoc, project pages, code coverage, and so forth, but for mondrian the only job I want it to do is dependency management. I don't want to throw away the considerable investment we've made in mondrian's ant scripts. I'd rather have something that adds dependency management to my existing framework.

I've just come across Ivy, and it seems to be just the ticket. Ivy aims to do dependency-management within an ant framework, and it uses Maven's repository and metadata protocols to manage its libraries. It's just been accepted by Apache as a sub-project of Ant, so we know that its integration with ant will continue to get better.

I went through Ivy's tutorial and was impressed that Ivy could bootstrap itself using just ant 1.6, JDK 1.4 (or higher) and a build.xml file. (Try it! Just download that file and type 'ant'.)

So, I'll be looking to add Ivy support to mondrian in the next week or so. The big benefit will be smaller distributions. If you download a source distribution, it will no longer contain libraries such as olap4j.jar, javacup.jar, commons-pool.jar, and so forth. The build process will download these libraries the first time you build. It takes quite a lot of effort, each release, to make sure that a source distribution contains all dependencies, so we hope to same some time there. We'll be able to delete these libraries from our source control system -- always a strange place for libraries, I thought.

And, for those of you who use mondrian with different libraries than we ship with (say you use a different version of log4j or apache commons than we do) you should be able to easily modify your dependencies and recompile the source distribution.