What are the assets in the new Nexus 3

Question

In the new Nexus 3 in the "Overview" section there are Assets and Components . What is the definition of assets?

I can not find it in the document: http://books.sonatype.com/nexus-book/3.0/reference/index.html

Answer 1

A component in Nexus 3 is an installable unit, which is determined by its coordinates (for example, artifact number ID + version number). Some repository formats have one file per component, while others have multiple files per component. Thus, the user interface allows you to view repositories either by components or by assets (files).

I will post a question to our bug tracker so that the book provides a complete explanation of the components and assets.

Answer 2

Quote from the book of Nexus :

Component

• Is a resource like a library or a framework that is used as part of your software application at run-time , integration, or unit test runtime, or is required as part of the build process. This can be an entire application or a static resource, such as an image.

Assets

• Assets are an essential complement to all of this metadata.

Example

For a typical JAR component in the Maven repository, which is defined at least by the POM and JAR files:

Components -

 example-project.pom.sha1 example-project.pom.md5 example-project.pom example-project.jar.sha1 example-project.jar.md5 example-project.jar example-project-sources.jar.sha1 example-project-sources.jar.md5 example-project-sources.jar example-project-javadoc.jar.sha1 example-project-javadoc.jar.md5 example-project-javadoc.jar 

Assets -

 example-project.pom.sha1 example-project.pom.md5 example-project.pom example-project.jar.sha1 example-project.jar.md5 example-project.jar example-project-sources.jar.sha1 example-project-sources.jar.md5 example-project-sources.jar example-project-javadoc.jar.sha1 example-project-javadoc.jar.md5 example-project-javadoc.jar maven-metadata.xml maven-metadata.xml.md5 maven-metadata.xml.sha1 

Answer 3

This is explained in the concepts chapter of the Nexus Repository Manager 3 documentation. Basically, the assets are the actual binaries and other files associated with the component. A component can have one or more assets and is a comprehensive aggregation and container for metadata.