I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus recently, but I should be back to posting soon.  I switched projects and have been spending a lot of time cleaning up some big messes.  I turned a nasty Eclipse right click/export build into something usable.  We ended up with a sweet Maven/Nexus/Hudson build process.  I’ve used Maven on a lot of projects and have a love-hate relationship with it. Dependency management is such a freeing experience, but I’m trying to cut down on the amount of time I spend with XML.  I know Maven 3 has the ability to create poms with Groovy, but I haven’t gotten into that much.  Instead, I’ve been using Gradle.  It has all the advantages of dependency management without the legacy cruft.  It took me a couple of days to understand what Gradle was doing and it’s still immature, but I think it has a bright future.  Either way, Nexus has been the core product that has brought all of this together.  Whether we are using Maven, Gradle, or Ant/Ivy, Nexus just keeps getting better and better.  It’s one of those products that I find just “works”.  I highly recommend it as the heart of a jvm build process.  I’ve got a lot more to talk about in this space, so hopefully I can’t blog on that soon.