Why I hate Maven

Yes, I admin that Maven has improved the development of Java programmers because the tons of dependencies each project brings.


So, why do I hate it so much? 


Thousands of network calls
One of the main reasons is because of the thousands of network calls to remote servers to

• check versions
• check md5
• download pom files
• download jar files

To keep the internal repositories up-to-date Maven has to check all the dependencies in the internal repository daily and each Maven user has to pay the latency cost of downloading a lot of files all the time. A workaround for this problem might be to install nexus or Jenkins on a server on the local network, but you still have the problem with latency on the internal network.

A workaround for me is to do 'mvn clean install' each morning, then go and fetch coffee...

Simple tasks is hard

Simple tasks as creating an executable jar or building a new version of an application should be a piece of cake, but it isn't. All this can be done by using a lot of plugins, but the major problem with these plugins is the lack of documentation. 

You are forced into creating a bunch of Maven modules

Separating your code into different modules is good programming practice, but I don't like separating it because the build tool requires it. Creating a simple Maven project often requires you to create 4 or 5 maven modules and that's just to much.

Repeatable builds

Do I really trust Maven to give me repeatable builds? No. I do not trust that downloading dependencies from the internet will give me the same versions of the file each time. A better solution would be to fetch all dependencies from a revision control system.