I am or now should I say was happy with Ant.
It was doing all the things i wanted it to do and support in terms of documentation and other compatablity was also their.So from my prespective ,i felt absolutely no need to change to another build tool.But readin so much about maven on discussion forums and its idea about Convention over Configuration is something i always wished for.
Whenever we move to another project , its structure is the single most annoying thing.You are used to some way and now these guys are doing same thing another way.Their is no right or wrong but just diffrent and this really should be done away with.
Plus the fact that in ant you need to specify where is the ’src’ ,how to compile java file ,where test classes are ,how to generate test-reports seems bit too much.So the fact is Iwas aware of benefits maven gives but still found no compeling reason to make a switch.
This monday I needed to set up a new project and so just thought of giving maven a try.And I was able to set up a maven based project whith test-reports,PMD reports,Findbugs-reports,Coverage reports,Java-Docs etc in less than 15 min.This was awesome ,I can do all this is ant quite easily but nothing like this.
So in my opinion ‘Transitive dependencies’ is really great in Maven but its their emphasis on ‘Convention over Configuration’ ,which makes maven such a great tool to use.
Personally i am feeling bit sad as Ant used to be so cool and now it think i need some compelling reason to use ant!
