Slick Forums

I'm for Maven infrastructure for Slick, If I remember correctly somewhere on forum someone have tried this before, I'm right?
Anyway, my suggestion is use Maven 3, out from some time,works fine (I'm talking from a real work experience)

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You are right but please consider that we are not on a large company where we need to use Maven. I work in a small company and we had maven which was sooooo bulky and hard to use that we switched back. We are just 10 people or so. There is really no need to have that useless "managing"-stuff. To much overhead.

The current Structure is just fine. Does anyone really have a problem with it?
(And why are you forced to pull the libraries again? You only need to do that if someone changes them o.o)

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Current Projects:


Projects:
- Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

different experiences, maven help developer when switching projects with a default workflow (clean, install, test, package, etc..).
Maven could help slick in particular on package side:
- runtime dependencies,
- build exe
- distribuite for linux (32/64), mac os x
- package for applet,
- build one runnable jar

Something newbie always ask on forum

and could help also on modularity for slick: more simple test and try slick core or slick tests or slick utils

IMHO, my 2 cents!

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Okay.

One yes
One no
And the rest does not care and hope the thread dies soon?



Nitram

I've never used Maven and have no idea what it's for. What will this mean for developers? What will this mean for end-user? Will there still be a "Download full distributable" button? What about linking to LWJGL/TinyLine/IBXM/JOrbis? How will the user go about acquiring all the libraries and linking everything?

The reason I was initially chose Slick (some time ago, whenever Kev started it) was because it looked simple and was easy to get up and running without needing to know anything about source control, Eclipse plugins, or what have you. Since our target audience is generally beginner game developers coming from a Java2D background, whatever changes we make to Slick and its design have to be suitable for this type of audience.

Oooookay.

Maven is basically a building and dependency management.

Instead of the build.xml you write a pom.xml that describes the layout of the application. So the name, the version, the authors, some weblinks and all the dependencies. When packaging a application using Maven, it downloads all the required dependencies from maven repositories (the largest one is the maven2-repository). The maven integration into IDEs works very good with Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, no idea about Netbeans. The IDEs creates the project files based on the default maven layout and automatically downloads and links the required libraries (along with the source and the javadoc). So you don't have to take care for anything there.

For game developers nothing changes. As its now you got your slick-x.jar you can link in your application or in case your application uses maven as well you can use the maven artifacts as well.

As summery:
What this thread proposes is the change the Slick development to base on maven. This effects ONLY the development of Slick itself not the development of games using Slick. This part just stays the same.

Nitram

Sure, I'm in favour then.

But please consider the amount of extra work we need to do. For us it's not that hard to hit the build.xml to make a jar right? Why inventing the wheel a new when we already have everything working?
Imho we should concentrate on making the library better and not compicating the process of making it work for us...

But well if everybody want's to add it, I can't to anything against Damn Democracy!

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Current Projects:


Projects:
- Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

if maven could save time for slick developer (in particular for transitive dependencies), is okay.
time to get a poll for it?

another idea is have two branch of slick: one old style and one maven?
Maven branch could have more only pom.xml, and same source code of old style branch? Maybe automatically sincronized?

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Synchronizing branches never ends well

The main problem that kills the idea of having the current layout and a maven layout standing side by side is the requirement to change the location of the source/resource/test-files in order for maven to work properly.

Surely we can create the maven layout in a seperated branch in order to give everyone a chance to take a look at it. In the end how ever we have to descide for one method. Dragging along both won't end well.

Nitram

You want to complete shange the packaging? Maven can't work with any given form? Now I'm even more against it xD

_________________
Current Projects:


Projects:
- Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

I don't think it's a good idea at the moment.

Reasons:
1. Slick only has one dependency (LWJGL and it's related jars), Slick-AE maybe libGDX and LWJGL.
2. All we need for the build process is in the build.xml and working fine.
3. Devs are still not comfortable with Mercurial/bitbucket and Maven requires a directory tree revamping.
4. We have to make sure that all dependent libs are in some remote Maven repository or in the master remote Maven-2 repository. Is that the case?
5. Every developer machine gets bloated with a local Maven repository.
6. Every IDE also supports build.xml files.

Honestly I don't see the benefits.

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