codesmell.org

Artifactory is a piece of software that aims to replace m2proxy as an intelligent proxy to maven repositories.
It comes with a bundled Jetty instance and install-scripts, those guys definately put some effort in. Everything works quite flawless right out of the bag.
The Web Interface is far more superior than m2proxy’s. The good news is you can browse the local repository and caches to remote repositories, peek into poms, and delete nodes from that tree very easily.

Even better is the form page, that reduces the burdon of installing files to the local repository by typing some mvn deploy-file -D.. -D.. etc to filling a simple intuitive web-form.

The downside is, that it is quite overdone: almost anything is ajaxed.
But hey, that is not even close to the main responsibility of a maven proxy, right ?

Looking at the core abilities, you quickly get to why it is interesting to even think about getting rid of m2proxy:
You can define include and exclude-rules for repositories, so that it will never be necessary to ask the servers at people.apache.org, if it had the latest snapshot of your homegrown, unreleased library.
This does not only make the everyday use of maven a little faster, but also safer in terms of keeping information discrete in your company.
Configuration is simply done through a typical xml-file (glad, they did not try to build an ajaxed GUI for that as well).

Sidenote: Artifactory does not use the Filesystem as a store for artifacts the way m2proxy does. It uses JCR instead, which i assumed should make textual searches quite fast, but doesn’t.

Conclusion: Two thumbs up! The areas in which it has its weaknesses are not important ones at all. We have a repository of about 3G imported to it, and it is fast enough in every-day work.