Stop using Maven for open source projects... please...

Honestly, just stop it.

Locking us into a particular build system is simply wrong. Say if a particular popular open source project uses Maven and I want to integrate it into a build system based off of ANT? No luck without a stupid amount of work.

Want to find the actual library a project is using so you can root around inside it? Good luck with that.

Compatibility issues between different versions means that I have to wipe my local repository when switching between two large projects (which I do frequently)... How is this saving me time again?

I have no problem bundling a build system with a project (it would be stupid not to) but Maven isn't just a build system, it's a dependency management system as well. If I was frothing at the mouth more, I'd call it a dependency obfuscation system...

Please, please, please... and I'm looking squarely at you Apache. If you must use Maven, include an alternative method of building the project for the rest of us.

Bye Bye Slider, Hello Hero!

So Slider, the mobile version of the Flex framework is dead.

Instead, we are getting Hero, the code name for the new Flex framework. No word as yet whether this is a point release or Flex 5...

Deepa threw a whole load of links into her blog post about it. Most pertinent being...

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Hero
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/mobile/faq.html

Most interesting part of this is finally a major update to the Datagrid! Anyone who's been kicking around from Flex will remember the last go at updating the Datagrid. The horrid AdvancedDataGrid which, and lets be fair to it here, was barely usable...

Once the news gets out in a proper way, I'd imagine the SDK team will be inundated with kitchen sink requests for a new Datagrid.

Which will we get from the Spark Datagrid... A decent replacement or ADG 2.0?