A good build script should be self-contained, self-booting and portable. You should be able to check it out of source control and run it. No buts. Period. The rules (or tips) that follow should be self-evident and applied everywhere. Unfortunately, they are not. The following "rules" are based on issues I've encountered in existing real-world build scripts.

There are several Maven repository managers on the market, but the two most prominent and most powerful are without doubt Nexus and Artifactory. Both these products are open source, with commercial versions containing more advanced features. Both are fine products, with many similar features. In many cases, however, Nexus and Artifactory respond to similar user needs, but in quite different ways.

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If you are a Java developer, and you want to write software for mobile devices, Android is without a doubt the most accessible mobile development platform out there. The reason for this is simple: you write your applications in Java, using tools that you are already familiar with (notably Eclipse). Because of this, the the learning curve is a lot gentler than learning to develop on IOS for the iPhone or iPad, which involves also learning a whole new language. And, as we will see, you can also benefit from all the great tools and techniques (unit testing, automated builds, Continuous Integration and so forth) that you are used to in a Java development environment.

This article is not about writing Android applications, though that is a fun topic too! This article is about integrating an Android process into the broader automated build infrastructure. It is the first of two-part series - this article will look at how to automate your Android build process with Maven. The second part will look at automated testing and Continuous Integration on the Android platform.

Cargo is a versatile library that lets you manage, and deploy applications to, a variety of application servers. In this article, we look at how to use Cargo with Maven.