Many of the core Maven developers are getting together in Mountain View this Thursday for a Maven Meetup to discuss about some of the recent developments going on, and some of the features we're working on. We're likely to discuss features going into the 2.1.x stream, and the 3.0.x stream, and Mercury. Mercury is the new artifact transport and repository subsystem for Maven. Mercury is very cool because we've been working with the Jetty developers to make a high speed, indestructible transport for Maven with built in DAV support. We have also been working with Daniel Le Berre from the SAT4J project to provide the best dependency resolving mechanism possible. SAT4J is also being used by the P2 project over at Eclipse.
Mercury has no dependencies on Maven (other then now officially being a sub-project of Maven) and we've implemented the first versions not using POMs. We plan to make Mercury a general purpose tool for interacting with repositories. Our first target is, of course, going to be Maven repositories, but we have support slated for P2 repositories and GEM repositories.
We also plan to do some demos of m2eclipse and Nexus on Thursday as well. For m2eclipse we have a really cool project materialization plugin that we've created which will provide the easiest way to on-board new developers anyone has ever seen, and we have a new error reporting system while not immensely exciting will help us more effectively support the m2eclipse community. We also plan to talk about the new plugin architecture for Nexus which we plan to make available in the Nexus 1.1 release.
If you happen to be working on an Open Source project and you're trying to get your artifacts into the Maven Central Repository then Sonatype is providing a new way for Open Source projects to deploy to a Nexus-based repository which Sonatype will then synchronize to the Central. We are initially working with the folks from Jetty and EHCache. We will also help with any projects wanting to setup more standard synchronizations. Greg Kick from Google will be stopping by so we can try and get a sync running for some projects at Google code.
So if you're interested in Maven, m2eclipse, and Nexus then please stop by on Thursday to chat and learn!
