I’ve had a few conversations lately about software tools and technologies — how to use them, how to pick them, how to know when to change, etc. These conversations can be exciting, educating, emotionally charged, productive, and sometimes not.

In a recent, very positive exchange, one colleague asked if I preferred Maven over Ant or Ant + Ivy simply because I had more experience on Maven.

Generally, I couldn’t say I preferred one technology stack over the other because I simply don’t know enough about the organization to make the call.

From a purely technical perspective though, my gut told me there is a brighter future in Maven than in Ant+Ivy. My reasons for this opinion are grounded in my experience, so I decided to research a few factors I consider important when it comes to technology tool selection.

a.reference{font-size:10px;}

Apache Maven
Apache Ivy

Founded
2002
[wikipedia.org]
2004
[wikipedia.org]

Latest Stable Release
1/20/2012
9/30/2010

Jenkins Plugin Installs
~50,000
[jenkins-ci.org]
~1,200
[jenkins-ci.org]

Contributors
128
[ohloh.net]
9
[ohloh.net]

GitHub repositories
43,866
[github.com]
2,772
[github.com]

Couple of interesting observations from the stats above:

• While Ivy is ‘2 years newer’, it’s last stable release was roughly 2 years earlier than Maven.
• There are roughly 1500% more GitHub repositories referencing Maven than Ivy
• There are roughly 1400% more contributors for Maven than Ivy (according to ohloh.net, anyway)

Google Trends also has an interesting view contrasting these two projects: Google Trends: Apache Maven, Apache Ivy

When discussing open source software projects, I usually think “we need to consider the vibrancy of the community”. How many people and organizations are contributing? How often? What other well known projects integrate with this tool?

From my view - when it comes to technology selection, it’s often OK to “follow the crowd”.

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It always bothered me that the JSR168 <portlet:actionURL /> and <portlet:renderURL /> tags didn’t encode their HTML character entities. The lack of encoding causes your HTML 4 or XHTML 1 markup to fail automated validation. After flipping through a bit more of the JSR286 spec, it mentions that in JSR168 “the behavior in regards to XML escaping URLs written by the tag library was undefined” 1. So, some vendors may have encoded and some may not have (as of 2.7 JBoss Portal, for example, does not).

Well, it turns out that the JSR286 expert group noticed that and accounted for it. Section 10.4.1 defines a new container runtime option: javax.portlet.escapeXml. The option causes portlet URLs to be escaped and is true by default. This is primarily for backwards compatibility so that older portlets that dependended on unencoded URLs will work on a portlet 2.0 container.

This option and its default value should make validating your portal UI markup much easier, though it might cause one minor annoyance. Because your portlet URLs will now be encoded, you can’t trigger them directly using javascript.

For example, you wouldn’t want to call the following:

<script type="language/javascript">
var url = '<portlet:renderURL><portlet:param name="id" value="5" /></portlet:renderURL>';
window.location = url;
</script>

Because the URL above would be encoded, your ‘id’ parameter wouldn’t be passed along properly.

To avoid this, you’d want to decode the URL before accessing in through javascript. We use ExtJS on my current project, which offers a handy method for doing just that:

<script type="language/javascript">
var url = '<portlet:renderURL><portlet:param name="id" value="5" /></portlet:renderURL>';
window.location = Ext.util.Format.htmlDecode(url);
</script>

It’s always nice to see this kind of improvement in the spec; hope this is helpful for you!