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I did XP in extreme C++ for about a year (by extreme C++, I mean boostified, Alexandrescu'd C++). We used CppUnit for our test framework.

I'm not especially satisfied with the currently available C++ unit testing frameworks. CppUnit and Boost's both have trade-offs. I suspect they'll both get better, though.

The Ant-Contrib project's cc task works pretty well, in my limited experience. I was playing around with it just this weekend. I've yet to set up a tinderbox build process, but I don't see why this wouldn't be easy with either Cruise Control or good ol' cron.

In my mind, the two biggest hurdles with doing XP in C++ are build speed and developer prejudice. You can tackle build speed with a combination of ccache, distcc, good programming principles, and cash. Tackling developer prejudice is harder. A lot of C++ programmers like to write low-level, unsafe, old school C++ code. Modern C++ mostly lets you discard unsafe coding practices without sacrificing efficiency. Whether you can convince an old C++ programmer of this is another matter; it depends on the person. I've had decent success taking Java programmers and teaching them modern C++ via pair programming.

Using Boost helps, indirectly. You write safer code, which gives you a faster development cycle. All in all, I think the basic tools are there. It might be a little harder to get fancy lava lamp integration going with C++, but there's no reason why you can't have a good build process. It's just that a lot of C++ projects haven't evolved (I think this is due, in part, to the fact that the C++ community is late to the internet; a lot of C++ programmers just don't know what's, out there.

cheers,

Jon

I did XP in extreme C++ for about a year (by extreme C++, I mean boostified, Alexandrescu'd C++). We used CppUnit for our test framework.

I'm not especially satisfied with the currently available C++ unit testing frameworks. CppUnit and Boost's both have trade-offs. I suspect they'll both get better, though.

The Ant-Contrib project's cc task works pretty well, in my limited experience. I was playing around with it just this weekend. I've yet to set up a tinderbox build process, but I don't see why this wouldn't be easy with either Cruise Control or good ol' cron.

In my mind, the two biggest hurdles with doing XP in C++ are build speed and developer prejudice. You can tackle build speed with a combination of ccache, distcc, good programming principles, and cash. Tackling developer prejudice is harder. A lot of C++ programmers like to write low-level, unsafe, old school C++ code. Modern C++ mostly lets you discard unsafe coding practices without sacrificing efficiency. Whether you can convince an old C++ programmer of this is another matter; it depends on the person. I've had decent success taking Java programmers and teaching them modern C++ via pair programming.

Using Boost helps, indirectly. You write safer code, which gives you a faster development cycle. All in all, I think the basic tools are there. It might be a little harder to get fancy lava lamp integration going with C++, but there's no reason why you can't have a good build process. It's just that a lot of C++ projects haven't evolved (I think this is due, in part, to the fact that the C++ community is late to the internet; a lot of C++ programmers just don't know what's, out there.

cheers,

Jon

CruiseControl is a continuous integration tool. Mostly it's for Java but there's a .NET port too. Basically, it regularly compiles a code base to make sure no one broke anything with their commits. Apache uses something similar called GUMP.

Ha ha...

It's not IIS, it is of course, Apache with Rivet. We were in the middle of some work on the server, and as I commented elsewhere, I *just* created this and am still tweaking the software. It's still at the stage where I'm doing research for hardware to put in myself in order to make it a useful resource.

Neither the list, nor the server, nor anything else was ready to be published on slashdot, or anywhere else high-traffic for that matter. I guess I shouldn't have linked it on kerneltrap, but it was handling the traffic there no problem.

In any case, you can read more about the idea, and some other people's comments on it at here, which also has a link to the thread on the kernel mailing list:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3695

Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it.
Uh huh. That's why a majority of the world's web servers run Apache. here These developers are hardly "weekend hackers", but devoted people. Read this

As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
So that's why Google and Amazon, for example, run Linux? [netcraft.com]

I say complete because as I recall, their XML export in the latest version of office was half-hearted at best, and lost a LOT of formatting. So by "complete" I mean lossless.
Ah. I was under the (optimistic, bright-side-of-life) impression that Microsoft actually made the default format of Office 2003 XML. Which they apprearantly didn't.

But the open source filters for OpenOffice and the like are rather good. They're by no means perfect, but hey - later versions of Word aren't too good at reading older .doc-documents either. I like the idea of a .doc-to-XML-translator, though. The POI project looks promising. I imagine that the OpenOffice.org filters will be of use as well.

buildCP.bat
-----------
FOR %jar IN (%PATH_TO_LIBS%\*.JAR) DO CALL appendCP.bat %jar

appendCP.bat
------------
SET CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;%1

Of course, the way I usually deal with the CLASSPATH is make ant deal with the CLASSPATH and then just package everything into a mega-JAR and distribute that.

Not the best solution, granted, but...

1) The stupid $CLASSPATH. Since I don't do a lot of Java work, I don't actually set this stuff up in .profile or .cshrc or anything, but any time I want to try to compile it's a matter of mucking around in /usr/java/ trying to figure out what the classpath needs to be. Then, naturally, I'll be using some shell other than CSH and forget how to set the local var ;).

media wiki is built on PHP, served from a webserver and keeps its data in a database. Currently I am running Apache and mysql. I believe their are windows ports of both available, as well php. Here are a few links.

http://us4.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.0.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/
http://www.cygwin.com/

I have not heard of anyone installing it on windows, so if you do get it running you may want to consider documenting your results and post it somewhere for others who want to follow in your footsteps. If you decide that it is to much effort, Linux generally installs very well on older hardware that can be had for virtually pennies.

Oh, and I feel safe enough from a slashdotting now that the thread activity has decreased, here is my website http://butsuri.homelinux.net/. It is on a dynamic IP but freely hosted through dyndns.

Would you rather have to depend on the system registry?

Ultimately, the CLASSPATH is good for you. I don't really understand what the problem is with adding another jar file to this environment variable. If you insist on being lazy, then rejar everything into one big jar. Ant can help you do that.

Yeah. Java really sucks and is uncool. No open source programmer would ever use it.

Hell, could you ever imagine an orginization like Apache producing Java code. If that ever happens I'm giving up and moving to Jakarta.

Apache impressed people with its English-style configuration directives that have influenced other developers to switch to such logical formats. Another example: the Postfix MTA is becoming more popular and many users say they enjoy using it because of the straightforward configuration, compared to the m4 mess of sendmail. "It has to be complicated to be powerful" is no longer an excuse.

personally I'd prefer a much better set of filter tools e.g. being able to say "I only speak English, I NEVER use this account for commerce, and the people I email are professionals so score spelling mistakes much higher as probable spam".

can someone point me in the direction of such a filter?

How about spamassassin?
Just add the following to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf:

And increase the score for BIZ_TLD and other tests you find more important than others. Scoring per test is fully configurable, complete list of tests here.

If all software was free, why would anyone bother developing it?

Gee, I can't think of anyone who would develop software without getting paid for it...

But seriously, there are several reasons people would write software whose price is 0:

• People want better software to do $WHATEVER (for values of $WHATEVER that make money, which is most of them), so they write it
• People want to get a job as a programmer so they write a software package to prove they aren't total code monkeys
• People like fame; they like being admired and appreciated
• An industry consortium decides they need an open, standard, free way to do $WHATEVER
• Some people have a political motivation to undermine proprietary software (we may not have that same motivation; but it is a real driving force for some people)
• Some people like to help others (ditto)
• Your company might want to make your product universally (or nearly so) used in order to be able to charge money for training, certification, etc.
• I mentioned 15 high-profile products that are competitive with best-of-breed and are available for $0 (and not all of it is Free as in speech). All of them were written because one of the above bullet points (or one I forgot) applied.

There are lots of motivations for people's actions besides money.

Otherwise, I run my own mail server with blacklists and SPAM filtering, further filtering with my mail client, leaving me very few junk mail messages to actually deal with. As far as I know, no false positives have been lost. The server ignores suspected servers, andthe spam filter throws away any high-scoring mail, leaving low-scoring spam for the mail client to handle, which gives me a chance to find mail I would want to keep (very, very, rare), tossing the rest in the trash can so I can peruse them.

I have a web mail client, too, so I can check in from anywhere I can't fire up my client or shell in.

Also, I don't worry about space. I'm casual (OK, lazy) about deleting mail, and after several years of not deleting what should probably be deleted I've only accumulated a couple hundred MB of crap. (Yes, it's sorted automatically into folders by sender or content.) That includes old "let's have lunch" announcements as well as mail with large attachements. The server's got another 50GB of space on it (slowly being eaten by web server and mail logs), so I'm not too worried about running out any time soon.

1 GB would suffice and give me another few years to fill up. Then I'd probably have to get rid of those lunch invites from 1998...

I think the whole of Jade should be living in commons.apache.org somewhere

You mean: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/

The Jakarta project is Apache's Java efforts. commons.apache.org used to hold common libraries such as APR for Apache HTTPD. These were mostly C libraries, I believe.

Apache Jakarta Commons (ok, so Apache needs to clean up and simplify there project namespace), rocks.

Here's there summary for commons-collections
* Bag interface for collections that have a number of copies of each object
* Buffer interface for collections that have a well defined removal order, like FIFOs
* BidiMap interface for maps that can be looked up from value to key as well and key to value
* MapIterator interface to provide simple and quick iteration over maps
* Type checking decorators to ensure that only instances of a certain type can be added
* Transforming decorators that alter each object as it is added to the collection
* Composite collections that make multiple collections look like one
* Ordered maps and sets that retain the order elements are added in, including an LRU based map
* Identity map that compares objects based on their identity (==) instead of the equals method
* Reference map that allows keys and/or values to be garbage collected under close control
* Many comparator implementations
* Many iterator implementations
* Adapter classes from array and enumerations to collections
* Utilities to test or create typical set-theory properties of collections such as union, intersection, and closure

For those doing Swing programming, also check out Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) project (this isn't from Apache, unfortunately). The documentation isn't that great yet, but the API is all you need.

Seriously?

Apache, for starters... Tomcat can be used as one... IIS...

Here's the Apache dav mod link to give you full WebDav capability, free of charge! http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_dav.html

My Anonymous Friend... The salutations are appreciated. It has been a challenge for our team to develop and to share the GPSTk. I hope you discover its benefits, and I hope they outweigh the distastefulness of Perforce and Jam.

Please allow me to briefly explain why Jam was deliberately chosen over the GNU autoconf toolchain as the build process for GPSTk.

Jam addresses a larger set of users than GNU autoconf. Does configure work using the Borland free compiler? With MS .NET or MSVCC? No. We did not want to ignore that important community, not did we desire to support multiple build processes. Can make resolve library dependencies dynamically (upon invocation)? No. These are practical examples of why Jam was chosen over the autoconf/configure/make toolchain for the GPSTk.

Jam is not just a "hack" as one reply claims but a serious contender for the replacement for the make/configure/autoconf toolchain. If autoconf/make is such the obvious choice for all projects--then why are there so many alternatives? Other make variations or replacements include ant, cmake, qmake, and confix.

However I will be the first to admit Jam has flaws. Poor documentation is perhaps the greatest. Lack of familiarity is a runner up IMHO. Despite its flaws, Jam was chosen for its simplicity.

Perhaps the above sounds too defensive. I don't want to make the impression that the GPS Toolkit team would not consider switching to, say, CMake or autoconf. We have chosen the Open Source route for this project. The "many eyes" principle is founded upon challenge--we should accept this challenge to our build process. And we know we are asking for challenge by not following the autoconf convention. But the effort to switch build processes would only be considered if (1) the new build process broadened the user base or (2) it addressed technical inability in the current build process. Otherwise, the choice of build tool is arbitrary and if so, our choice is Jam.

or Derby

You should be happy using servlets and jsp

Um, no thanks. JSP sucks. Having code in the UI layer is a big no-no. JSP's are hard to maintain. I agree with you that J2EE persistence with EJB's sucks, but you can certainly do a lot better than jsp and servlets.

Check out Tapestry, a much better way to write web apps than JSP, using MVC so that your html page is just an html with certain id's on some tags, and you have components that can be placed inside other components to make up a page. Or use Struts. Or Velocity. Or Turbine. But please, if you can avoid plain JSP's, then stay away from them. They lead to all kinds of nastiness in your apps.

That, together with other projects like Hibernate, which is a very good persistence layer (so good that it's going to become the new JDO; they're already adopting HQL for the new EJB persistence) and Spring, which you already seem to know, you can build much more elegant apps than using JSP and servlets.

Three things have changed: broadband has meant that applets are not as slow to load as they used to be; machines have got faster; and JVMs have got better (including plugins).

In the project I'm working on (I'm a Java developer, mostly servlet/JSP/struts) we're deploying an applet to provide a richer user experience which HTML alone would not provide. I would not have dreamt of providing this solution even a year ago.

The applet is very usable, only takes a second to load the first time it's used (and thereafter is cached) and the user has a better experience of our product. We're telling our customers to use JRE 1.4.2.

The trick is to use applets when they are appropriate. This is, after all, true of all technologies.

I believe that eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ and netbeans http://www.netbeans.org/ have both made a huge contribution to showing how Java applications can be used for serious development projects. There is now a huge amount of support for the Java development community, with lots of free libraries (Apache Foundation rocks http://www.apache.org/!) and some great stuff coming out of Sun (Java Server Faces).

Put it all together and you have a very rich environment for creating serious multi-tier applications using web or application front-ends.

For me, the icing on the cake would be the development of a forms standard which allows application-like front ends with a web architecture. Maybe XForms? XUL? This is what our customers want. Combine it with a strict and workable MVC architecture and it'd be my perfect development environment!

Well, I try to keep the two things independent of each other, but if you insist, here it is. A small project, but perhaps you've heard of it.

That's true, but the grandparent was talking about Jakarta Collections. To get comparable functionality (for some things) you have to install additional third-party software and keep track of the dependencies for each application.

In particular, to do something relatively simple like easily getting command-line arguments you need to use a third-party. It comes down to your particular application. If I'm writing a quick-and-dirty app that requires command-line parameters and is platform independent, I'll use Python over Java anyday. I don't want to rewrite the command-line parsing code and I don't want to install another jar.

The fact that Jakarta Commons Lang exists further emphasizes this point. Most of the functionality it adds to the Java base install is already in Python by default.

That's true, but the grandparent was talking about Jakarta Collections. To get comparable functionality (for some things) you have to install additional third-party software and keep track of the dependencies for each application.

In particular, to do something relatively simple like easily getting command-line arguments you need to use a third-party. It comes down to your particular application. If I'm writing a quick-and-dirty app that requires command-line parameters and is platform independent, I'll use Python over Java anyday. I don't want to rewrite the command-line parsing code and I don't want to install another jar.

The fact that Jakarta Commons Lang exists further emphasizes this point. Most of the functionality it adds to the Java base install is already in Python by default.

There is sort of something like this out there. The Apache License 2.0, section 3:

3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

Yeah, I know, this only covers patent litigation and not copyright litigation, but it's a start.

Don't know if this is really relevant, but as is noted in the Section 5.G of Feb 2004 ASF Board meeting minutes, the PHP project is terminated and rights for PHP will be tranfserred to the PHP group.

The Apache Software Foundation is a private operating foundation that is registered as a non-profit, charitable organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. This means that, for individuals within the U.S., donations to the ASF should be tax-deductible.

While I haven't used Cloudscape in a very long time, I imagine this is more competition to other Java open source databases like HSQL, Axion, or McKoi.

Most of these databases are used by "embedding" them into an application (something not uncommon in Java programming), not as a standalone database server like Oracle or Postgres. Of course, like I said, it's been a long time since I looked at Cloudscape so it could have changed to be more of a standlone server.

I'm also surprised I haven't heard more about this in Apache, but I imagine it will first go through the Apache Incubator to sort out any legal issues and then end up somewhere in the Apache Database project. If anyone has more info, I'm interested to know.

While I haven't used Cloudscape in a very long time, I imagine this is more competition to other Java open source databases like HSQL, Axion, or McKoi.

Most of these databases are used by "embedding" them into an application (something not uncommon in Java programming), not as a standalone database server like Oracle or Postgres. Of course, like I said, it's been a long time since I looked at Cloudscape so it could have changed to be more of a standlone server.

I'm also surprised I haven't heard more about this in Apache, but I imagine it will first go through the Apache Incubator to sort out any legal issues and then end up somewhere in the Apache Database project. If anyone has more info, I'm interested to know.

Luckily, my boss has tasked me with looking for better automating solutions. The product being a J2EE web app, I've found a few useful tools from Apache's Jakarta project:

• Cactus (functional verification of J2EE components)
• JMeter (for performance- based evaluation, more from an HTTP front-end, but you can write Java plugins for it).

Luckily, my boss has tasked me with looking for better automating solutions. The product being a J2EE web app, I've found a few useful tools from Apache's Jakarta project:

• Cactus (functional verification of J2EE components)
• JMeter (for performance- based evaluation, more from an HTTP front-end, but you can write Java plugins for it).

1. Strict adherence to the test first methodology (JUnit). It isn't enough to just write test cases, without nightly (or frequent) builds JUnits loose a lot of their effectiveness - especially in large groups. In addition, having regular code reviews to make sure people aren't just blowing smoke is essential.

2. Early and often QA cycles. Not only will the development team love this, so will your product owners. Here's a good starter for the http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/releaseoft en.html release often concept. Doing this will make your QA cycles much more effective and manageable.

3. Don't over automate. Automation can be a very effective tool; however, there must balance.

As for tools (sorry pretty Java centric here), I'd suggest starting with:
- http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/
- http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus
- http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/

Do you mean Lookout, that MS recently bought (available here),
Is based on the open source lucent.net

However, the OSS End User Apps like AbiWord (that are not corporate backed) are perpetually trying to catch up with the proprietary vendors.

Yes, I could probably make a pretty good living patching and enhancing open source projects for indivdual companies... Compiere (as one example) has a lot of room for such improvements, but that's not the point. It's not about making a living, it's about launching a successful project. I am certainly not saying that the proliferation of OSS developers alone will stop me. It's that the threat of OSS developers reworking my idea into a free application is equally as high as the threat of Microsoft reworking the idea, and making it a core part of the next Windows.

The two; "big proprietary" vs. "small but numerous OSS" balance eachother out. Between these two major market forces, there's little room left for the "small but still propietary".

Again, I don't see this as a complaint as much as a simple statement of fact.

However, the OSS End User Apps like AbiWord (that are not corporate backed) are perpetually trying to catch up with the proprietary vendors.

Yes, I could probably make a pretty good living patching and enhancing open source projects for indivdual companies... Compiere (as one example) has a lot of room for such improvements, but that's not the point. It's not about making a living, it's about launching a successful project. I am certainly not saying that the proliferation of OSS developers alone will stop me. It's that the threat of OSS developers reworking my idea into a free application is equally as high as the threat of Microsoft reworking the idea, and making it a core part of the next Windows.

The two; "big proprietary" vs. "small but numerous OSS" balance eachother out. Between these two major market forces, there's little room left for the "small but still propietary".

Again, I don't see this as a complaint as much as a simple statement of fact.

What I'd like to know is, if there are any steps to identify GPL violations? There are companies all over the world using and modifying OSS tools (most notably from the Apache foundation) and selling them (or selling them as part of their product suites). Is there any initiative to counter this?

The Apache license isn't GPL, although it is compatible with it.

We test using the following on web apps:

• Target browsers for intranet apps (even though we use standards as much as practically possible)
• W3C validators for HTML, CSS, and Links
• Validators within WebSphere Studio (Java, JSP, HTML), HomeSite (HTML) and TopStyle (CSS)
• JavaScript Console and Debugger in Mozilla/Firefox
• JUnit
• Cactus
• People. The users. The project owners. Us. Other web developers on e-mail lists.

• We aren't currently using an automated tool to test the front-end flow, because we haven't found any good, easy-to-use, and cheap tools that support a modern version of DOM/JavaScript usage. If you know of something that you like and works, I'd love to know about it. I've tried httpUnit, but had trouble setting it up and it didn't support all the DOM methods we were using at the time.

I work on my personal site ryanclark.org which I learn from to help with my work. My company likes the idea and I have no problems with using my site for beta testing my new ideas.

I also run a buddies site of mine on the same box trevorbryan.com, which is the cleaner production of my work for him to use.

I mainly learned a large amount of PHP from this as well as helped with many monitoring suites like OSSIM (Open Source Security Information Management) which is an awesome IDS suite which uses most of the major open source IDS tools. I also, play around with MySQL, Apache projects like Maven.

exemplary over the years, especially when cmpared[sic] to microsoft iis.

exemplary over the years, especially when cmpared[sic] to microsoft iis.

Usually these projects have promissions which ask the submitting developers to donate their code to some sort of foundation _before_ submitting. For example take a look at the Apache Software Foundation!

Note: I am not an Java developer or Ant user.

Try the 2nd paragraph of http://ant.apache.org/ for one answer.

"Ugly language/syntax" is subjective. (Personally, I think makefiles and XML files are equally ugly, and don't even get me started on auto*.) Fortunately, with the tools available today (e.g. http://www.eclipse.org/), we have few excuses to manually edit these sorts of files. Therefore, "prettiness" is of little consequence.

I don't know if there is a solution for auto* integration. We have to keep in mind that Ant was designed for use with Java, which has no need for such kludges.

Even Apache is releasing its own Java J2EE application server called Geronimo!

Apache Geronimo

I get 3000 spams/day with my catchall address (krellan.com)!

I will soon be putting in a whitelist of allowed usernames, and bouncing everything else, in hopes of reducing this ridiculously high spamcount.

I get only 100 spams/day correctly addressed to my real addresses that I use on that domain.

This is still too high, but a combination of SpamAssassin on the server and Bayesian filtering on the client (Mozilla Thunderbird) help reduce the number of spams I actually see to almost none! (For safety and in case of false positives, all emails are still archived.)

Well Microsoft does get to pay Hotmail's bandwith bills, email storage costs, and employ people to deal with abuse reports? Don't forget that they also get to deal with all the spam that is undeliverable, bounced, or dropped by user's filters etc. Per individual spam, Microsoft may well be paying less than a recipient, but there is definitely a very real price tag attached.

Unfortunately however, under CAN-SPAM, only ISPs and not end-users can use the legislation to go after spammers through the courts. As the owner and operator of Hotmail that would naturally include Microsoft. Of course, the statement that the actions has "netted them $54 million" means the courts have awarded them that much, they will actually see far less of it than that.

It would certainly be nice if Microsoft (and others in a similar position) would make at least a token contribution to the anti-spam groups out there. Spamhaus operates almost entirely on contibutions and sponsorships, Spamcop has a legal defence fund, Spam Assassin is now under the auspices of the Apache Foundation... the list goes on.

Unfortunately most people seem to hate it.
Maven mailing list(s) is one of the most active ones, with +50 messages a day. Most articles and comments at ServerSide, IBM DeveloperWorks and elsewhere are quite favorable toward it. Many major projects (e.g. Geronimo) are using it.

I dont like supposed development aides thats want to tell me how I should organise everything to suit its quirks rather than my preferences.
Maven follows well established practices (e.g. directory structure) from the Apache Jakarta projects. Accustomed to Ant's freedom, I also was unhappy with some defaults/behaviors initially, but gradually all of them made sense.

Its really irritating when this demands vast amounts of configuration to achieve
I interpret this to mean that attempting to implement your quirks in Maven took vast amount of configuration to achieve, and have no objection to that.
Another massive configuration effort is required when an existing complex and rather quirky Ant build of a large application is migrated to Maven (as it was in my case, I should mention that I wrote also the Ant build ;-)).
But starting with Maven on a common medium-sized app is relatively easy when using the GenApp plugin.

requires a scripting language who creator has apologised for creating an abomination
I agree here. I also do not like the idea of executable XML, of using XML as a programming language. Please note, however, that Jelly is an interface for tags in Maven used to implement plugins. In principle, any mechanism for embedding tags will do (and there is significant work in this direction for v2 AFAIK).

So, apart from personal taste, Maven is quite a solid production-ready project build and comprehension tool.

--
Svetlin

Another part of this project (or at least one that depends on it) is the Jelly project. It allows you to define a GUI (SWT or Swing) in an XML file. I suppose it's similar to XUL, but it's an interesting project nonetheless.

Jelly SWT

http://maven.apache.org/

Is Apache okay because they don't actually say 'you can't take us to court'? Rather they say 'taking action terminates this license'. Consequently the patent holder is free to take action, as long as they wear the consequences of their Apache license being cancelled?

Comparing a model like Zend to a model like Apache is apples and oranges, frankly. Apache is an non-profit, organization that is both privately held (i.e. not publically traded) and does not sell products based on the apps that they create. Whenever any company starts requiring a profit from whatever they're doing, and worse if they are accountable for quarterly earnings reports for the stock market, there is the potential for what I will loosely call "bad things". I'm not suggesting Zend or other groups like MySQL or JBoss have done any bad things, but it's always possible.