Earlier this year, while working on a project for TRIOLOGY GmbH, I once again used maven to write a version name into an application, using the mechanism described in my post Maven: Create a simple build number. As a more sophisticated version name was required for this project, we expanded it by a time stamp, SCM information (branch and commit), build number and a also created a special name for releases. You can find a how-to here – Version names with Maven: Creating the version name – which is the first part of a small series of blog posts on this topic.
The second part shows how the version name can be read from within the application. While writing the examples for the post, I wondered how many times I must have implemeted reading a version name from a file in Java. Way too often! So I decided that this would be the very last time I had to do it, and extracted the logic into a small library: versionName, availble on GitHub. What it does and how to use it is described in the second part of the post: Version names with Maven: Reading the version name.
Hopefully, this will be useful for someone else. Funny enough, in the new project I’m on, I’m about to reuse it once again. I’m glad I don’t have to write it again. Here’s to reusability 🍺
