Open Source Invite

Who doesn’t love free stuff? With software and hardware reaching higher and higher price points, it’s especially rewarding to find open source software these days. And fortunately, there’s a lot of it out there. We utilize open source technologies to build our software infrastructure quite frequently and we figured it was due time to give back to the community that has provided us with so much.

We went through our code to find parts of it that were not directly related to our product and could be helpful to others. We thought about the most commonly used open source technologies in our office and came up with Tomcat, Apache Commons, Flex and finally, Maven. We decided to make our own open source product to simplify plug-ins for Maven, so here goes our first Thetus-bred open source product.

Maven takes a description of our builds requirements, formulates a build plan, and then executes it. Maven handles most things without intervention, but when you need to, you can write plug-ins to provide fine-grained control.

We noticed a lot of the plug-ins we were writing for Maven had some commonalities and instead of recreating or copying and pasting code, we pulled that pesky repetitious code out and created the Thetus Maven Toolbox. This toolbox gives you easier ways to access Maven’s build plan and perform common plug-in tasks. These tools let you build up information about your project as a whole, and get info out of the lovely model that Maven provides.

The Thetus Maven Toolbox drastically simplifies authoring certain types of plug-ins — such as those for launching other java programs — and can make previously convoluted tasks simpler. We hope you find this toolbox as useful as we have, keep a look out for more Thetus-bred open source projects!

To use the Thetus Maven Toolbox https://bitbucket.org/Thetus/maven-toolbox