Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 4. Project Reporting and Publishing

Maven is a project comprehension tool at heart. Its general goal is to wrap existing project sources and make sense of them by providing different views. In this chapter you will learn about several Maven plug-ins that help provide visibility for project stakeholders and users. You'll play with plug-ins providing four types of visibility:

Reporting on Project Content

It is useful to provide visibility on project content, such as mailing lists used, the development team, the Source Control Management (SCM) repository used, the project dependencies, and more.

How do I do that?

The XDoc plug-in automatically generates project information by parsing the Project Object Model (POM). Let's take the qotd/core subproject. Typing maven xdoc (also called if you run maven site) generates Figure 4-1, where you can see the following four reports:

Mailing Lists

The different mailing lists used by the project. They are defined in the POM using the mailingLists tag (see "Telling Maven About Your Team" in Section 1.1).

Project Team

The members of the teams, and their roles. They are defined in the POM using the developers and contributors tags (see "Telling Maven About Your Team" in Section 1.1).

Dependencies

A list of external dependencies used by the project. They are defined in the POM using the dependencies tag (see "Adding a Dependency" in Section 1.1).

Issue Tracking

A link to the issue tracker used by the project. It is defined in the POM ...