Earlier this week we published John Ferguson Smart's new article, Maven Repository Managers for the Enterprise. In this article, John outlines the need for a repository manager in the enterprise environment, then describes how the most established Maven repository managers perform the required functions.
John starts out with an analogy:
If you use Maven, or even if you just use Maven repositories for your dependency management, you should be using a Maven Repository Manager. It's like using a kayak without paddles: you'll get there eventually without them, but your life will be much easier if you are properly equipped.
Why is it so important to use a repository manager in the enterprise development environment?
A correctly-configured repository manager can speed up your builds, save bandwidth, help you share artifacts within your organization, and give you better control as to what dependencies are used in your projects and where they are coming from. It can also play a key role in your development infrastructure, helping you set up a fully-blown automated build and deployment pipeline.
John then gets into the details. If you've got a large development team, and you're building large, complex software, do you really want each individual developer downloading whatever packages they need onto their local machine as they work on their segment of the code base? That's a non-starter, surely, since the inevitable result is going to be different segments of the complete system depending on different versions of the same libraries -- a potential nightmare when you later try to build all the pieces into a working application.
So, no, in a large software development project, you want a much more controlled, coherent system of dependency management. This is one of the most important functions that a repository manager provides.
Probably the most fundamental role of a repository manager is to act as a proxy/cache between you and the internet. One of the most important features of Maven is the notion of declarative dependency management. Indeed, in a Maven project, you don't store the JAR files your project needs in a lib directory within your project - rather you list the dependencies you need directly in your build script. Ant users can also use declarative dependency management, either by using the Maven ant libraries or by using Ivy.
Maven repository managers provide many conveniences as well (for example, the need for each developer to maintain a long list of public dependencies in settings.xml disappears). Maven repository managers can even work with an existing LDAP repository, to configure which users have which permissions with respect to different projects.
Maven Repository Managers for the Enterprise provides an excellent overview on why enterprise development teams in particular need a repository managers (but even smaller development teams can benefit from the more coherent, controlled environment they offer) and how Maven repository managers work. It's a very instructive read!
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