How to get the HIGHEST version of an artifact via Maven Nexus REST api?

Question

I though I could use /nexus/service/local/artifact/maven/resolve?r=releases&g=com.mycompany&a=myArtifact&v=LATEST

Then I read about the difference between LATEST and RELEASE.

In Maven 3, LATEST is no longer filled - ok
But RELEASE gives me only the latest released version!
So how can I fetch the HIGHEST version of an artifact?
I need something, which returns version 2.1.3
Any clue?

Here's my maven-metadata.xml from Nexus:

<metadata>
  <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
  <artifactId>myartifact</artifactId>
  <versioning>
    <latest>1.0.4</latest>
    <release>2.0.5</release>
    <versions>
      <version>1.0.0</version>
      <version>1.0.1</version>
      <version>1.0.2</version>
      <version>1.0.4</version>
      <version>1.0.5</version>
      <version>1.0.6</version>
      <version>1.0.7</version>
      <version>2.0.0</version>
      <version>2.0.1</version>
      <version>2.0.2</version>
      <version>2.0.3</version>
      <version>2.0.4</version>
      <version>2.1.0</version>
      <version>2.1.1</version>
      <version>2.1.2</version>
      <version>2.1.3</version> <!-- released week ago -->
      <version>2.0.5</version> <!-- released today -->
    </versions>
    <lastUpdated>20120531131959</lastUpdated>
  </versioning>
</metadata>

Answer 1

Use the code from DefaultArtifactVersion to create version instances from the strings which you can sort using compareTo().

The code is in the artifact

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-artifact</artifactId>
  <version>3.0</version>
</dependency>

Note that this doesn't always work. For example commons-lang:commons-lang has the version 20030203.000129 which is older than the latest 2.6 but sorts higher.