"Get Running on CDI & JSF2 in a Jiffy Using Maven Archetypes" - is a good illustration of how Maven and Nexus help make it easier for open source projects to distribute code and project templates to developers.
The Weld framework is an almost perfect case study of how using Archetypes benefits the community by making it easier for new users to get up and running quickly. A member of the Weld community, Steven Boscarine, proposed a Maven 2 archetype in November of 2009, and you can follow the discussion thread where he takes the time to explain the benefits of having an archetype to the community. One month later, the Weld framework has a functioning Maven Archetype which is available on Central, and which will now appear in the Archetype catalogs in m2eclipse and Netbeans.
Three months ago, to get started with a Weld application you likely had to copy and customize an example project from jboss-seam/examples. Today, if you want to get up and running with a basic Weld application, all you have to do is fire up an IDE, and use one of the Weld archetypes. By making it easier to fire up a new Weld project, they've increased the potential audience size. People expect to be able to get up and running with a new framework in seconds, they don't want to stop and read the instructions, and we've all been influenced by the immediate ease-of-use of a framework like Ruby on Rails. Maven Archetype provide a similar level of immediacy for a whole array of technologies.
As projects start to use Maven Archetypes, Maven Repository Managers, and tools that can read the Nexus Index format, people are starting to realize that we've achieved a more immediate and more efficient way to distribute new frameworks (in this case Weld). This particular story isn't just about the "build", it is about the way that this project can publish new archetypes to central, and also how tools like m2eclipse can get an up to date list of available artifacts.
Here's a quote we're seeing more and more of as projects start to take advantage of Maven Archetypes:
There is no faster way to get started with CDI and JSF 2 than using these archetypes!
Sonatype's work on Nexus has helped the industry move toward more integrated, immediate, and efficient systems to support development and distribution. The author of this article thanks Sonatype "for making it so streamlined for OSS projects to publish artifacts to the Maven Central repository with Nexus".
Read the original article here: "Get Running on CDI & JSF2 in a Jiffy Using Maven Archetypes"
