Apache Maven 3.0 has landed, but it's really just the beginning. The work that Sonatype has done to bring Maven 3.0 to fruition is substantial. It's been hard, it's taken a lot of Sonatype's time and resources, but we're glad we did the work and we see this as a new beginning for Maven. We will, of course, keep working on Maven but with the release of Maven 3.0 Sonatype will, at least for a little while, turn an eye to Maven's Eclipse-focused cousins, the Maven Shell, Polyglot Maven, and Hudson.

We have work to do on Tycho to get it fully setup for the parallel IP process at Eclipse, we will soon start a very intensive set of iterations to bring the M2Eclipse core to a 1.0 state, and we have committed within Sonatype to move M2Eclipse to the Eclipse Foundation. The M2Eclipse project at Eclipse has been in suspended animation for a while but we plan to work toward getting M2Eclipse into the release train and have Indigo be the first Eclipse distribution to ship with Maven capabilities. Tycho and M2Eclipse will also be a lot of work, but I think Sonatype has demonstrated that we're committed to making these projects work and can deliver as we've shown with Maven 3.0.

There will be a release fairly soon of the Maven Shell, I will be starting a new phase of work on Polyglot Maven, and I'll also be talking about concretely what Sonatype plans to do around Hudson -- and what we've already done. Once we get a few more of the projects we're working on to a healthy state we will begin the dialog with the community about what features users are looking for in future versions of Maven and related tools.

The Maven community owes a special thanks to Benjamin Bentmann, who has worked consistently and persistently for a long time on Maven 3.0. He has been amazingly responsive in applying fixes for reported issues, and has set the bar very high for the quality of a open source project. We have an enormous number of integration tests and without a doubt, Benjamin really has made this the best version of Maven we've ever had. I'd also like to thank Igor Fedorenko who is responsible for Tycho, along with all the changes he made to Maven core to allow its dynamic adaptation, as well as putting in place the performance framework for Maven 3.0. And Maven users can also thank Oliver Lamy for making sure the Maven Site Plugin is compatible with Maven 3.0.

You can download Maven 3.0 now!

[http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/apache-maven-3.0-bin.zip][3]

[http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/apache-maven-3.0-bin.tar.gz][2]

[2]: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/apache-maven-3.0-bin.tar.gz

[3]: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/apache-maven-3.0-bin.zip

Enjoy!