feedAnt+Ivy
August 28, 2007 | 
co.mments
What I love about Maven is dependency management, including the transitive dependencies and all the related scopes.I also like the (theoretically) integrated documentation. I like the APT format for getting docs written without getting hung up on formatting & etc.
I like building at the project or at the module level.
However, in practice, Maven is painful.
The comments are also worth reading. I've always held that Maven is a good idea, let down by its implementation.
I suspect many people have a bad impression of Ant from the pre-1.6 days and having to do hacks like entity inclusion to manage large projects. Specifically the pain points were subprojects and jar dependencies. This resulted in evaluating/using Maven or a homerolled system. But today, Ant's support for big projects is really quite good, better than Maven's. And Ant is nothing if not solid. If you want to see what a modern Ant based build system can do, get Steve Loughran's book, Ant in Action, or go to antbook.org. I don't see a use for Maven or its conceptual weight, given Ant 1.7+Ivy.
August 28, 2007 01:27 PM