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Maven Sites – Reloaded

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In recent times, Maven Sites came close to becoming extinct. Maven Plugins were still using them for the wonderful automatic documentation page (named goals), but regular projects were not using them anymore.

However, Maven Sites have some huge benefits such as keeping the documentation close to the code, and automatically providing reports, information and API docs (Javadoc). Being able to release the documentation at the same time as the code was also a great advantage.

So why was this feature not used? Several reasons:

  • The look and feel was terrible.
  • The apt syntax was terrible.
  • The customization was terrible.

Now, though, it’s possible to create much better Maven Sites using Twitter Bootstrap for the skinning and Markdown for the editing. Even better, if you use GitHub, your site can be automatically updated on your project’s GitHub page.

This blog post explains how to use all these new features.
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Mavenizing Javascript Projects

| Daniel Bremer-Tonn

Installing an automatic build process for your projects is very common today and best practice. In the java world Maven is a very popular build tool and has proven its matureness over the years. In this blog post we will show you the benefits of a Maven build and how we can utilize them for javascript projects. Finally we present two maven archetypes for creating ready to go fully mavenized javascript projects for your first steps.

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Reusing Android components with Rindirect.

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Android applications can grow very quickly. As they are composed of components (Activities, Services and Content Providers), it should be easy to extend an existing application to create new applications by just reusing already developed components. Recently, the akquinet Mobile Team had to develop several versions of the same application with a different set of features. This might sound easy, but Android does not really support such kind of modular development. Indeed, we faced several issues coming from the Android development model.
This blog post explains the encountered issues and how we fixed them by using rindirect. This tool allows, inside an Android application, to integrate components defined in other Android applications. This reuse pattern is close to impossible to achieve without rindirect or implies major limitations. Rindirect is developed by akquinet and is now available as open-source. This tools is well suited for Maven-based development, and so, works pretty well alongside the maven-android plugin.
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