Who: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF): all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives.

What: In development for nearly 10 years, and an ASF Top-Level Project since 2003, Apache Maven is the build system of choice for millions of developers and thousands of organizations world-wide.

Why: Maven 3 represents the culmination of nearly two years of work re-architecting the internals of the system based on experience gained over the last five years with Maven 2.x. Maven 3 is faster, more reliable, and more extensible, with users already reporting 10-40% improvements in build time over Maven 2.

"A key priority for our users was backward compatibility," said Brian Fox, Vice President of Apache Maven. "We've invested a significant amount of time and effort to ensure a smooth transition while maintaining backward compatibility with Maven 2 builds and plugins."

Highlights of the release include:

  • Parallel build capability
  • Conversion of IoC system from Plexus to Guice, including a Plexus compatibility layer
  • Rewritten dependency resolution logic, designed to be extensible and embedded in other applications
  • Improved POM validation during the build to warn users of potential problems
  • Improved error handling and messages
  • Decoupled reporting engine from the core
  • New inheritance and interpolation code designed to be extensible and allow composition of POMs in future releases
  • More robust handling of local repository data
  • True plugin classpath isolation
  • Massively improved regression test suite for Maven core and plugins

Further details are available at http://maven.apache.org/docs/3.0/release-notes.html

When: Apache Maven 3 was released on 8 October 2010

In addition, Apache Maven training will be held on 1 November at ApacheCon in Atlanta, Georgia.

Where: Apache Maven 3 is released under the Apache License v2.0, and available for download at http://maven.apache.org/

For details on Maven training visit http://apachecon.com