At the time of this writing, the initial technology preview for Maven 2 is available from the Maven web site (http://maven.apache.org). Although Maven 2 shares lots of concepts with Maven 1, it is a complete rewrite, and builds created for Maven 1 will not be compatible with Maven 2. Maven 1 plug-ins will not be directly compatible with Maven 2 plug-ins, and Jelly has been abandoned as a core scripting language. There will be migration paths, though. This book is peppered with references to Maven 2 and how Maven 2 differs from Maven 1. New features in Maven 2 include:
Many developers and businesses tend to wait anywhere from a few months to a few years to adopt a new project, and Maven 1 will remain in use for a long time as the feature set of Maven 2 is solidified and Maven 2 has time to prove itself. A final release of Maven 2 should be available in August or September of 2005, and plug-ins will be ported to Maven 2 as developers move to the 2.0 release. Please note that the previous sentence was an estimate; providing a solid date for the release of a software project is an impossible feat, but based on progress at the time of this writing, Maven 2 is well within reach. |