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Apache Maven vs GitHub: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown document compares the key differences between Apache Maven and GitHub.

  1. Maven Lifecycle and Build Tool: Apache Maven is primarily a build automation tool used for project management and dependency management, while GitHub is a web-based platform for version control and collaborative software development. Maven provides a predefined lifecycle and a consistent build process, making it easier to manage complex projects with multiple modules. In contrast, GitHub focuses on version control and collaboration features, allowing developers to work together on source code and manage its versions.

  2. Dependency Management: Maven provides built-in dependency management functionality, allowing developers to specify external libraries and dependencies in a central configuration file (pom.xml). Maven resolves and downloads the required dependencies automatically from remote repositories. On the other hand, GitHub does not have built-in dependency management, as it primarily focuses on version control. Developers using GitHub need to manually manage their project dependencies directly in their source code or use external tools like package managers.

  3. Plugin Ecosystem: Maven has a rich ecosystem of plugins, offering a wide range of functionalities like code compilation, testing, packaging, and deployment. The plugins are designed to integrate seamlessly with the Maven build process and adopt convention over configuration principles. In contrast, GitHub does not have a dedicated plugin ecosystem like Maven. However, GitHub provides integrations with third-party services and APIs, allowing developers to extend its functionality through various integrations and actions.

  4. Continuous Integration and Deployment: Apache Maven integrates well with continuous integration and deployment systems, making it easier to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. Maven can trigger CI/CD pipelines on source code changes and provide consistent build artifacts. GitHub supports CI/CD pipelines too, but it requires the use of external CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, or GitHub Actions, which offer more flexible configurations and integrations with a wide range of platforms.

  5. Community and Collaboration: GitHub has a large and active community of developers and open-source projects. It provides features like issue tracking, pull requests, code review, and discussions, enabling seamless collaboration among developers. GitHub also serves as a platform for discovering and contributing to open-source projects. Maven, on the other hand, does not have a dedicated collaboration platform like GitHub. While Maven projects can be hosted on GitHub, collaboration features are not inherent in the Maven tool itself.

  6. Hosting and Deployment: GitHub offers a hosting platform for source code repositories, allowing developers to store and manage their projects in a central location. GitHub provides tools and features for repository management, version control, and deployment. In contrast, Maven is not a hosting platform. It can be used to build and package projects, but the final artifacts need to be deployed to a separate hosting environment or repository, such as a web server or a binary repository manager.

In summary, Apache Maven is primarily a build automation and dependency management tool with a predefined build lifecycle, while GitHub is a web-based platform for version control and collaborative software development, offering features like issue tracking, pull requests, and code review. Maven focuses on building and managing projects, while GitHub focuses on version control and collaboration among developers.

Decisions about GitHub and Apache Maven
Weverton Timoteo

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

See more
Weverton Timoteo

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

See more
Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 703.9K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

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Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

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Nazar Atamaniuk
Shared insights
on
DeployPlaceDeployPlaceGitHubGitHubGitLabGitLab

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.

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Pros of GitHub
Pros of Apache Maven
  • 1.8K
    Open source friendly
  • 1.5K
    Easy source control
  • 1.3K
    Nice UI
  • 1.1K
    Great for team collaboration
  • 867
    Easy setup
  • 504
    Issue tracker
  • 487
    Great community
  • 483
    Remote team collaboration
  • 449
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 122
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 113
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 60
    It's free
  • 56
    Network effect
  • 49
    Extensive API
  • 43
    Organizations
  • 42
    Branching
  • 34
    Developer Profiles
  • 32
    Git Powered Wikis
  • 30
    Great for collaboration
  • 24
    It's fun
  • 23
    Clean interface and good integrations
  • 22
    Community SDK involvement
  • 20
    Learn from others source code
  • 16
    Because: Git
  • 14
    It integrates directly with Azure
  • 10
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 10
    Newsfeed
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 1
    Profound
  • 1
    Dasf
  • 138
    Dependency management
  • 70
    Necessary evil
  • 60
    I’d rather code my app, not my build
  • 48
    Publishing packaged artifacts
  • 43
    Convention over configuration
  • 18
    Modularisation
  • 11
    Consistency across builds
  • 6
    Prevents overengineering using scripting
  • 4
    Runs Tests
  • 4
    Lot of cool plugins
  • 3
    Extensible
  • 2
    Hard to customize
  • 2
    Runs on Linux
  • 1
    Runs on OS X
  • 1
    Slow incremental build
  • 1
    Inconsistent buillds
  • 1
    Undeterminisc
  • 1
    Good IDE tooling

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Cons of GitHub
Cons of Apache Maven
  • 55
    Owned by micrcosoft
  • 38
    Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
  • 15
    Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
  • 10
    API scoping could be better
  • 9
    Only 3 collaborators for private repos
  • 4
    Limited featureset for issue management
  • 3
    Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
  • 2
    GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
  • 1
    No multilingual interface
  • 1
    Takes a long time to commit
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 6
    Complex
  • 1
    Inconsistent buillds
  • 0
    Not many plugin-alternatives

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is GitHub?

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

What is Apache Maven?

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

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What companies use GitHub?
What companies use Apache Maven?
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What tools integrate with GitHub?
What tools integrate with Apache Maven?

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What are some alternatives to GitHub and Apache Maven?
GitLab
GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.
Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.
AWS CodeCommit
CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
SVN (Subversion)
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.
See all alternatives