Over the few years, Maven has introduced radical change to software distribution. Seven years ago, it was the norm on a Java project to check binaries and JAR files into source control, and there was no good strategy for sharing libraries in a standard, universal way. Today, even those that continue to rail against Maven have embraced the repository format it created. While that format is established, there are other newer formats starting to emerging such as the P2 repository format that supports OSGi which is also supported by Nexus. With the 1.3.0 release of Nexus, developers, open source projects, and organizations have a capable repository management tool with a next-generation user interface based on ExtJS. Brian Fox, VP of Engineering for Sonatype, blogs about the release here. If you interact with a repository with Maven (or Ivy or Gradle or Buildr), or if you need to proxy or publish a P2 repository, go over to the Nexus Project Page and download a trial of Nexus Professional.

So... what changed with this release?

The overall summary is here: http://www.sonatype.com/people/2009/03/nexus-130-released/ But the biggest user facing feature is the mirror support, which is discussed in more detail here:http://www.sonatype.com/people/2009/03/new-feature-in-nexus-13-mirror-support/

Here are some of the new features. It is an incremental improvement over 1.2, but there are some interesting new feature that we hope people take note of:

• Mapping External Roles to Nexus Roles
• Nexus Logging Configuration
• Selecting Mirrors for Proxy Repositories
• Configuring Mirrors for Hosted Repositories