As good and as pervasive as Maven is, if you review build tools then you may want to take a look at Ivy too. I plan to.
Yes, Maven is hard to learn. The web site doesn't quite seem to be organized either for learning *or* for reference. The only book I could find when I went looking for one, _Maven: the Definitive Guide_, would have to be three times as thick if it were really definitive. Everything the new user reads praises "convention over configuration" and then doesn't tell you the conventions. Maven embodies some very definite ideas about how software should be built. If you try going some other way, Maven will smack your hand over and over until you winkle out what it wants you to do. Maven wants to be in control of things. It downloads what it wants, when it wants to, without asking. It puts things where it wants to, without telling you where they went. You must accept this. It is a thing that goes down hard for many developers. Maven is not readily discoverable. The way to get basic help from it is a complex formula that stretches all the way across the screen. The usual ways of asking a tool how it works will yield either reminders of things the newbie wasn't ready to learn, or a screenful of seeming gibberish. All that said, once you have scaled the learning wall (I'm maybe 40% up) Maven will do a good job for you so long as you use it the way it expects to be used. I haven't given up on it. (Oh, no! I've suffered enough that I won't rest until Maven cringes before my stern gaze, whimpering, "what is thy will, O my master?" as a good tool should.) -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
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