Link Details

I've always used Ant and have never had any showstopper issues... can someone enlighten me on why Maven 2 is such a pain? (and why people use it over Ant if there are such issues with it?)

This guy I work with swears that Maven is the greatest thing since two-ply toilet paper. So I downloaded it and set aside what I think is a generous block of time to get acquainted with it. Three days and $25 (for a book) later, I realized that this &%&$#*& hairball has got me doing all sorts of crazy jive like renaming JAR files and changing my whole development structure and building up what can only be described as an XML Clusterfuck, and get this: I'm doing it in the service of Maven! It's got me doing all kinds of hoop-jumpery so that it can download tons of stuff from ibiblio.org and create reports and websites and all kinds of needless gallimaufry, and for the life of me, I simply cannot see the slightest benefit. What's so hard about keeping a directory full of JAR files? We're human beings; we can't let something like that get us all flummoxed. Automation is great, but I refuse to spoon-feed some tool like Maven.

As with Ruby, the magic of Maven is convention over configuration, though unlike Ruby, at least from my extremely limited experience, with Maven you can set on configuration files to force it to do things the way you want....mostly....almost. ;)
Really, I use both Ant and Maven at work, and I voluntarily started setting up all my projects using the way Maven wants, and its BEAUTIFUL! For the first time ever, in better than 20 years of developing now, I can grab a brand new project from Subversion, run maven, and the friggen project just BUILDS, no path checking, downloads the required libs on its own. Yeah, I didn't like being told by my build tool how to set up my projects, but then again I hated letting my IDE dictate the same thing, stuck with a plain text editor for WAY too long because of it, and gave up on that as well after having the C*)p beat out of me for all these years. As for getting started, I'll be the first to admit it isn't easy, there still aren't any Maven 2 books (hardcopy, the guys that wrote the first Maven book have an ebook out).
So, will I say that Maven is my favoritest thing ever? Naw, my wife and son have that title tied up, but Maven sure has made developing in shared projects a lot easier.

Every person who complains about maven, makes the same statement that you did...
>> at least from my extremely limited experience

- If you switch to maven in the middle of a project, you are going to have to reorganized your directory.
- Letting maven manage your dependencies is smarter than putting a ton of jars into a lib and committing them to your versioning system repository.
- You can use snapshots of jars and get the latest version of the snapshot often, and automatically.
- Maven generated sites provide a form of documentation for your project. And is customizable enough that it can be a one stop shop for all of your project documentation needs.
- Convention > configuration. Mavens directory structure helps you to keep the same, standard structure across all of your projects. How is that a bad thing? And when you get put on a new project, or join a project that uses maven, you already know the directory structure that is being used.

These are a few benefits. If you don't see the value in each and every single one of these items, then it is my opinion that you are not the sort of software developer that I would want to work with, beside, or for.

Pointless, truly pointless.

Maven 2 is simply great. It does take some time to grasp, but this time is worth spending. There is an excellent book on Maven 2 available at http://www.mergere.com/m2book_download.jsp for free.

Pls also consider using Proximity (http://proximity.abstracthorizon.org) for better management of external and inhouse dependencies.