- Incompatibility with WebLogic: we use BEA Weblogic ant tasks that are not compatible with Maven build lifecycle phases. For instance, appc mixes generate-sources, compile and package; for this reason the maven-weblogic-plugin that uses these tasks has same flaw. So if you need to use other Maven plugins you must implement workarounds and attach them to unnatural phases to ensure they get executed before or after appc. See my previous post.
- Lack of flexibility: by nature, Maven is not flexible, the only ways to get more flexibility is to use profiles, maven-antrun-plugin or to write your own plugin in java: not really simple nor very productive especially if you need to write simple workarounds. It's strange because there seems to be a growing tendency in open source build tools to enable more flexibility: ant 1.8 feature list includes logic/control flow features from ant-contrib (for, if, while, etc…), gant uses groovy as build scripting language on top of ant, buildr uses Ruby.
- Lack of auditability: with Maven's convenient way to download missing parts and self update, it's difficult to know exactly what was used to build one version of your product. The fact that Maven mixes tool's dependencies of the tool (maven+plugins) and dependencies of the projects being built into one single local repository surely does not help here. it would be better if separation of concerns was implemented in local repository to ensure that the dependencies managed by the developers do not get polluted by dependencies that are out of its control scope.
- Issues are difficult to diagnose: I've got examples about classpath, system properties where it's difficult to find the culprit between Maven, plugins or dependencies.
- Plugins quality ranks from excellent to terrible: this is not a Maven issue by itself but combined with above mentioned difficulty to diagnose it can lead to painful situations.
- Maven's defect backlog is quite impressive and I'm not sure that the situation is going to improve soon.
So, our next approach will be to use ant for building and restrict Maven to managing dependencies and generating project site and quality reports.
