Nexus 1.0 Maven repository manager released

On August 22 Sonatype, the guys responsible of M2Eclipse, released the version 1.0.0 of their Maven repository Manager, Nexus.

If you are using maven as intensively as we do, you know how important is to have a local maven repository manager. It works as a local proxy to all the external repositories your project needs and it can be used to store you own artifacts. It must be fast, easy to manage and configure.
We have been using Artifactory for some time now, and it does the job pretty well. However, we decided to give Nexus a try and the results couldn’t be better.

The highlights of Nexus in my opinion are:

• Faster than any other maven repository we have tried.
• Very responsive and complete ajax-based web user interface. Most of the configuration, if not all, can be done using the web interface.
• It is very easy to integrate new repositories, whether they are proxied, hosted or virtual, and group them logically as a single one.
• It allows indexing of artifacts in remote repositories so they can be available to the search engine.
• Provides RSS feeds to notify changes regarding the artifacts deployed in the repository, something really useful to communicate changes within and between development teams.
• It does not use any database to store the downloaded artifacts. They are stored with the same structure they have in their source repositories, simplifying maintenance and potential troubleshooting.
• The documentation is of very good quality.

One of the drawbacks we have found is that it is currently available only as an application running in a Jetty container. Considering the amount of tools that nowadays are needed to effectively develop software, it would be great to have Nexus packaged as a war so it can be integrated with other deployments.

The enhancement request has been raised, so if you like this product as much as we do and consider this enhancement important, we encourage you to vote for it.

You can find additional information in this article at The Server Side and in Sonatype website itself.