I've been watching and trying out new development on this new Maven plug-in that's coming together after the recent threads [1, 2, Codehaus Proposal]. I've given a couple patches, and am becoming much more familiar with both it and the internals of Maven and the build lifecycle. I've spent more time than I would have liked encountering bugs and discovering that I’m an idiot, but the main developer has been extremely helpful. And all of this bug chasing has taught me a ton, so it hasn't been a waste by any means. As I told one of my colleagues: it’s the cost of early adoption; in the same way that some people lay down extra dough for the newest gadgets, I lay down extra time for the newest software.

I think this plug-in will be a great success and could potentially have a wide scale impact on the JS development community. The mature JS projects like dojo, scriptaculous and jsjac all have their own custom build scripts that do about the same thing as maven-javascript-tools. It will unify effort and allow people who like dealing with build tools to deal with build tools, and people who like dealing with libraries to deal with libraries.

I’ll be doing my part a bit more this weekend by creating some archetypes and maybe a screen cast if I’m feeling ambitious. I have to keep in mind that Soashable is my main project, and that I still have to do my homework. But man, does this project excite me!

It has the potential to raise confidence in JS and propel it to its place as a first class language. It’s been treated as one for quite a while now, but finally it will be able to walk the walk.