I've used Maven2 for many projects. It's a excellent build management tool, especially if you are in a shop where you need to manage more than handful of projects. Maven let you setup your projects very consistently, and you can use same commands to build and package artifacts uniformly.

If you haven't used Maven before, check out some tutorial on http://maven.apache.org. I have contributed a walk through tutorial Wiki on maven site before, and you may read here: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Getting+started+with+Mav...

Also, the Scala programming community has a great Maven plugin support, and with latest release, you may have both Java and Scala sources in the same project and they works very nicely. I have a simple project that you may use as template here: http://sweetscala.googlegroups.com/web/scala-java-app.zip

Just unzip it and cd into the project dir to type: mvn package, and look into your target dir, you will have a jar file created for you!

I am not here to start a war on Maven vs Ant. I think both are great tools, and I use Ant for some project as well. Maven is just another tool in the shed that I like to use, and would like to hear from anyone here who has experience to share.

Zemian Deng