Bringing external Jars to Maven Central Repository

I just faced the problem, that an open-source jar was not available in Maven Central Repository.

Background

I just wanted to utilize Picasa as a storage backend for my current project. First step to do so, is to find a suitable Java Library accessing Google’s infrastructure.

One might have two different options:

• The stable, but not further developed Google Data API
• The new, current and further extended Google API

After trying out the Google API, I decided to rely on the Google Data API since somehow post requests result in a HeapSpaceException and the utilization of Picasa is (at this moment) much more convenient over the Data API.

Searching Maven Central

So, I tried to find a Maven Artifact and was not able to find one on the Maven Central Repository and end up here: Since 2008(!), people are demanding a mavenization of the project. I guess, there is a need for having it available on Maven Central.

Although some approaches were made to store mavenized version on somehow own repositories (e.g. mandubian-mvn) or to automatically sync it (e.g. with the scripts of David Carter), I was not really able to find and use a recent version of gdata in central repo.

Putting it on Maven Central

As a consequence, I just uploaded the most recent version (without the API-Package) yesterday to central repo by using the sonatype 3rd party upload service. GData is now available as maven-artifact directly under

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.gdata</groupId>
    <artifactId>core</artifactId>
    <version>1.47.1</version>
</dependency>

I find it amazing and can entirely second that sonatype acts in this way to maintain the maven-environment.