What is the difference between Jenkins and Apache Maven?

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#1

Can someone tell me the key differences between Jenkins and Maven?

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#2

Hi Devan,

Since Apache Maven and Jenkins are both open source tools and existing most frequently used build and integration tools, a comparison is inevitable. In particular, DevOps professionals have to choose the right tool because it runs and executes their entire CI / CD pipeline. An inappropriate tool would almost certainly raise procedural barriers and create time management problems.

Statistically, the key factors that drive developers to prefer Jenkins are, they are hosted internally, 100% free open-source, and an incredible tool to build, deploy, or deploy anything asynchronous. Simultaneously, Dependency management and uniform build are the main reasons Apache Maven is favoured.

DevOps advocates are often requested for a ā€˜Jenkins vs Mavenā€™ comparison. Nevertheless, those who ask often discover that Maven + Jenkins integration is the best path to the success of continuous integration.

How about we start by getting a sense of each tool so that there is more clarity when we differentiate them!

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open-source, self-contained automation server with integrated plugins designed for Continuous Integration (CI) purposes written in Java. Jenkins can be installed in a few ways; through native system packages, Docker, or even run standalone by any machine with a JRE installed.

Jenkins can automate all sorts of tasks related to building, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis, and much more. It is used to continually build and test software projects, making it easier for developers to incorporate incremental changes and making it easier for users to acquire a fresh build. It also enables us to deliver our applications continuously by integrating with multiple testing and deployment tools.

Advantages of Jenkins:

  1. One of Jenkinsā€™s primary advantages is that it requires little maintenance and a built-in GUI tool for quick updates. The Helm chart makes it trivial to deploy Jenkins in a ā€œGitOpsā€ friendly manner.

  2. Overall simple architecture to deploy ( as compared to ā€˜modernā€™ CI/CD systems). Blue Ocean with Material Theme for Jenkins makes it look like any other ā€˜modernā€™ CI/CD system.

  3. Jenkins is 100% free and Open Source with excellent community support.

  4. Jenkins can be configured easily according to the requirements for continuous integrations and continuous delivery.

  5. Platform Independent. Since it is written in Java, Jenkins is portable to all platforms and different operating systems, whether OS X, Windows, or Linux.

  6. The extensive pool of plugins makes Jenkins flexible and allows building, deploying, and automating across various platforms, thus promoting a rich Plugin ecosystem.

  7. Fewer integration issues since most of the integration work are automated, saving time and money over a projectā€™s lifespan.

  8. Just like any other prominent CI/CD form, Jenkins can integrate container steps. Of course, teams can do redundant things with Jenkins, but with Jenkins best practices, your pipelines should echo as any developed with CircleCI. Using container steps only helps reduce pipeline complexity.

  9. Jenkins Shared Libraries are also one of the most polarizing features. The libraries carry an inert ability for teams to define ā€œPipelines as Interfaces.ā€ Using pipeline versioned libraries achieves this without introducing any instability.

Disadvantages of Jenkins:

  1. With a plethora of plugins available with Jenkins, sometimes it becomes cumbersome to identify the best suited for your CI/CD pipeline. Moreover, Jenkins has many plugins that seem to be no longer maintained.

  2. Where imperative groovy pipelines are notoriously complicated and unmanageable, the Declarative pipeline is gold. However, not all plugins are compatible with Declarative pipelines.

  3. Although Jenkins inherits the rich Plugin ecosystem, it considerably lacks documentation. You might stumble upon information on how to implement it way behind its real potential.

  4. Running ā€œmulti-masterā€ Jenkins for high availability is still not practical without using Jenkins Enterprise.

What is Maven?

Maven is a Yiddish word that means knowledge accumulator. It all started as an effort to simplify the Jakarta Turbine projectā€™s build processes. There have been many projects, each with its Ant build files, where the JARs were checked into CVS, and there was a need for a standard way to create projects, a simple description about the project, an easy way to publish project data, and a medium of distributing JARs through multiple projects.

A result is a tool that can now be used for any Java-based project to develop and manage.

Maven is the cornerstone of Java development. Besides being a build management tool, it also supports test-driven development, long-term project maintenance, and declarative configuration with a wide range of plugins, making it a popular CI/CD option.

The streamlined, XML-based configuration model of Maven allows developers to quickly describe or understand any Java-based project outlines, making it a snap to start and share new projects. Maven also supports test-driven development, long-term project maintenance and makes it a popular option for CI / CD with its declarative configuration and wide range of plugins.

Feature Summary Of Maven

  1. Maven has a simple project setup that follows best practices to get a new project or module started in seconds.
  2. Consistent usage across all projects - results in no ramp-up time for new developers coming onto a project.
  3. Able to efficiently and quickly work with multiple projects at the same time.
  4. A Maven central repository is for those who need to use it or contribute.
  5. Extensible, with the ability to quickly write plugins in Java or scripting languages.
  6. Immediate access to new features and recent release with minimal configuration.
  7. Model-based builds: Without any scripting in most cases, Maven can build many projects into a WAR, JAR or distribution based on metadata about the project.
  8. Coherent site of project information: Maven can generate a website or PDF with any documentation you want to add using the same metadata to build processes and is visible at the bottom of this siteā€™s left-hand navigation under the Project Information and Project Reports submenus.
  9. Release management and distribution publication:
  • Maven integrates with your source control system (E.G., Git, BitBucket, or Subversion ) and manages a projectā€™s release based on a particular tag with minimal configuration.
  • It can publish this to a distribution location that can be used by other projects.
  • Maven can also publish individual outputs such as a JAR, an archive, including other dependencies, documentation, or source distribution.
  1. Dependency management:
  • Maven positively promotes the use of a central repository and other dependencies.
  • This mechanism enables you to download any JARs required for building your project from a central JAR repository.
  • It also allows Maven users to reuse JARs across projects, thereby encouraging communication between projects to handle backward compatibility issues.

So have many dependencies!? No problem at all. Maven connects to remote repositories or local repositories that you set up and offers to automatically download all of the dependencies needed to build your project.