People who follow opencsv will find this hard to believe – but it actually happened! Thanks to a whole lot of work from Scott Conway, a whole slew of patches have been applied to opencsv 2.0 is out in the wild! Scott has fixed heaps of the outstanding issues, so if you’ve opened something, make sure you check back to see if it made it in (it probably did!). We’ll have some formal release notes up there soon.
At the same time as Scott was patching, I took the chance to Mavenize the project as a good sample for my little Maven Quickstart course. Getting stuff into Maven Central has traditionally been a bit of a pain, but the good folk at Sonatype now have a fantastic Nexus setup that mirrors to central frequently (opencsv went from the Sonatype Nexus repo through to central in under 10 minutes - apparently the servers are in the same rack!).
Go and check out this Sonatype blog entry to get the skinny. Basically, you post a JIRA requesting access, they email you a username, password, and a set of repo address. Deploy your app, and they’ll sort out the sync to Central for you.
The only tricky part of the process was implementing the required GPG signing using the gpg plugin, but other than that life was grand! Have a look at the opencsv pom for sample usage. I could install the gpg binary via macports, and use a gpg quickstart to workout how to generate and export keys.
I’ve been a big fan of Nexus as a repository manager for ages. But what they’ve done with this central setup has been a huge boon for opensource projects wanting to sync up to central. Makes the process totally straightforward.
Awesome job Sonatype!