to all of those hating on Maven, TRY LEARNING MAVEN … Maven uses convention over configuration, but that does not mean you cannot tweak Maven to do extremely wild things … i have through the course of my Maven experience:
a) converted extremely complicated Ant builds to Maven (and some of these conversions required VERY creative thinking, but i still managed to get the job done in Maven, why? because I took the time to really understand the tool I was using: Maven)
b) developed wildly complex multi-module projects with very few problems, Maven is amazing at dealing with, especially, large complex projects … again, learn how to leverage Maven so that you avoid all these pains you people keep complaining about because you never took the time to investigate the *proper* implementation of a build
c) never had to resort to using Ant hacks inside of my Maven builds, I have successfully converted *all* wild and crazy Ant tasks that I have encountered into pure Maven, using as elegant as possible of a solution that I could have with Maven (without compromising what the original Ant task performed) … I could have given up early, like many seem to do, and just hack Ant tasks inside of a Maven POM, but u know what? i decided “no” i wasn’t going to be *lazy*, i decided to learn the tool

the lesson to be learned here is, learn the tool, Maven is extremely powerful with its resource filtering, profiles, plugins, etc. … don’t be afraid to *learn*

Maven adheres to a standard, which is one of the reasons why I like Maven, but this standard is just a default, you can override many things, and quite elegantly

Funny, I must be a damn genious then, because apparently I’m the only one on the planet who’s figured out how to do this without Maven. Perhaps Maven is meant as a crutch for lazy idiots…

MAVEN SUCKS

Did you read my follow up post I used both tools for a long time (I’ve even written well-referenced articles and documentation for Ant), and I have changed to Maven based on what I consider to be unbiased, objective decisions. In fact, I was very biased towards Ant+Ivy for a while, so the hurdle for me to move to Maven was higher than most. But I did it because the benefits were just too great to ignore. See my follow up post, referenced in the very first sentence of this blog post.

Cheers,

Les

I’ve seen worse, believe me…spending days if not weeks setting up a development environment just because you want to fix a small bug…sound familiar to anyone? This happens fairly easily if you stick with ant (which I love, I say it again) which is simply not cut out for the enterprise world…

just my opinion…unfortunately, many decision makers base their choice on a biased comparison between Maven2 and Ant+Ivy…

Setting up a Maven repository What is Maven? Maven Homepage

Learning curve of Maven is very steep. The whole concept of build life-cycle can seem very hard to grasp in beginning. Also the concept of plugin is diff (though Ant has something similar : taskdef) along with concept of POM inheritance.

But once well understood, you will be surprised how you ever managed with Ant before.

Key to success of using maven for large project is divide-and-win policy and well organized POM level inheritance. In my project we build very complex artifacts using 20 line POM. That make it such a great tool.

Another killing feature of Maven is reporting plugins. They simply great in many aspects and keeps developers on their toes to fill in the exposed gaps in their code/modules.

Everything I mentioned above makes Maven great tool but at the same time can create a potentially dangerous pit. Best way to understand the true potential of Maven is to embrace it with open mind and be ready to change your prospective completely with regard to software building.