Recently I got frustrated with the latency of accessing Maven remote repositories, so I sought a solution. What I found was Deng Ching's blog entry titled The Hype About Repository Managers. Somehow I wound up downloading Proximity and what I discovered made me very happy.
Proximity is somewhere between a Maven artifact cache and a Maven repo proxy. It runs as a web application locally and by pointing Maven at the local URL for the web app, Maven will look up dependencies for any given project build using Proximity. If the Proximity cache doesn't contain a dependency, Proximity does the work to fetch that dependency from a remote repo and stuffs it in its cache. So the first build when using Proximity is slow becuase it's propulating its cache with artifacts but subsequent builds are damn fast.
Upon first downloading Proximity, I dug through the docs trying to figure out how to add another repository and I couldn't find anything. So I pinged Tamás Cservenák, the creator of Proximity, via IRC for some assistance and he was incredibly helpful in working with me to accomplish this task (thanks again, Tamás!).
To add another Maven repo to Proximity, I had to edit the proximity.properties file to create another FSStorage.baseDir, the proximityRepositories.xml file to add new LogicDrivenRepositoryImpl, WritableFileSystemStorage and CommonsHttpClientRemotePeer bean definitions for the new repo and the proximityContext.xml file to add point to the LogicDrivenRepositoryImpl bean definition. Next, I had to tell Maven to use Proximity as a mirror of everything by adding the following mirror definition to the ~/.m2/settings.xml file for Maven:
<mirror>
<id>Proximity</id>
<name>Proxmity mirrored central.</name>
<url>http://localhost:8080/proximity/repository/public</url>
<mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf>
</mirror>
This tells Maven to look at the local Proximity URL for all artifacts and at that point, Proximity takes over. I've made available a ZIP archive of Proximity with my edits if you're interested. Using what I configured is as easy as downloading it, running it using the included jetty.sh script and editing your settings.xml file using the mirror config above. Then move aside your own local Maven repo so that a new one will be created.
In using Proximity so far, I've found that letting it spawn HTTP connections to download artifacts seems to be far more efficient that Maven. Chris started using Proximity and we're no longer seeing a huge amount of open sockets from downloading artifacts. So now I'm curious to peek at the Proximity source to see how this is being handled.
Also, Proximity is being adopted by Sonatype and it will be known as Nexus. For more info, see Jason's blog entry titled, Proximity Lives on as Nexus for Maven Users.
