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Apache Maven

Stacks1.5K

Followers876

+ 1

Votes370

Pants

Stacks14

Followers26

+ 1

Votes30

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Apache Maven vs Pants: What are the differences?

Developers describe Apache Maven as "Apache build manager for Java projects". Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects. On the other hand, Pants is detailed as "Build system by Twitter, Foursquare, and Square". Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Apache Maven and Pants can be primarily classified as "Java Build" tools.

Some of the features offered by Apache Maven are:

Simple project setup that follows best practices - get a new project or module started in seconds
Consistent usage across all projects means no ramp up time for new developers coming onto a project
Superior dependency management including automatic updating, dependency closures (also known as transitive dependencies)

On the other hand, Pants provides the following key features:

Builds Java, Scala, and Python.
Adding support for new languages is straightforward.
Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.

"Dependency management" is the top reason why over 125 developers like Apache Maven, while over 5 developers mention "Creates deployable packages" as the leading cause for choosing Pants.

Apache Maven and Pants are both open source tools. It seems that Apache Maven with 1.74K GitHub stars and 1.28K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Pants with 1.16K GitHub stars and 333 GitHub forks.

What is Apache Maven?

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

What is Pants?

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

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Why do developers choose Apache Maven?

Why do developers choose Pants?

128
Dependency management
69
Necessary evil
54
I’d rather code my app, not my build
46
Publishing packaged artifacts
38
Convention over configuration
13
Modularisation
6
Consistency across builds

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6
Creates deployable packages
4
Runs on Linux
4
Runs on OS X
4
BUILD files
4
Runs tests
4
Scales
2
Flexibility

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3
Complex
1
Inconsistent buillds
0
Not many plugin-alternatives

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What companies use Apache Maven?

What companies use Pants?

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What tools integrate with Apache Maven?

What tools integrate with Pants?

No integrations found

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What are some alternatives to Apache Maven and Pants?

Jira

Jira's secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work. Jira comes out-of-the-box with everything agile teams need to ship value to customers faster.

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

CMake

It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice.

Sonatype Nexus

It is an open source repository that supports many artifact formats, including Docker, Java™ and npm. With the Nexus tool integration, pipelines in your toolchain can publish and retrieve versioned apps and their dependencies

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Decisions about Apache Maven and Pants

frido

a few seconds ago | 9 upvotes · 19.7K views

Samosprava

Apache Maven

Gradle

We use Apache Maven because it is a standard. Gradle is very good alternative, but Gradle doesn't provide any advantage for our project. Gradle is slower (without running daemon), need more resources and a learning curve is quite big. Our project can not use a great flexibility of Gradle. On the other hand, Maven is well-know tool integrated in many IDEs, Dockers and so on.

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Reviews of Apache Maven and Pants

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How developers use Apache Maven and Pants

opening.io uses

Apache Maven

Java build tool for internal processes: Jezebel daemon (in-mem classifiers/recommendations/feature analysis), Connemara (batch resume stream processor) and opes (opening elasticsearch plugin, simple process that listens for new incoming resumes and triggers analysis by Jezebel via a tcp json command).

Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) uses

Apache Maven

All Java-Projects are compiled using Maven. We prefer it over Ant and Gradle as it combines lightweightness with feature-richness and offers basically all we can imagine from a software project-management tool and more.