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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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.

Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and more involved than a simple development deployment, but doing them by hand can be time-consuming, tricky and error-prone. Indeed, turning your staging and production deployments into a one-click affair has a lot going for it.