We've cut another release of Maven: The Definitive Guide. This version adds a new chapter on alternative plugin languages and makes some improvements to the Spring Web chapter (ch07).
The alternative plugin language chapter is light, I wanted to provide a starting point for people who were interested in starting to write plugins in Ruby, Groovy, and Ant. The Groovy and Ant sections need more development, but the Ruby section should be sufficient for someone looking to start writing custom Maven plugins. Over time, you should expect this chapter to fill out a bit, we still need to add sections about calling Ant tasks from a Groovy Mojo and I'm thinking about adding a more complex Ant example. Note that we cut Beanshell from this version of the book so that we could devote more time to these three languages. Please let us know what you think of the content.
As always, we're working towards getting this book into production and we really value your feedback. Please send all feedback to book@sonatype.com. We've had some really great feedback to date and a number of readers have helped us catch some errors and clarify some issues. I'm making it a practice of added people's names to the acknowledgements as we go along. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to send us feedback.