Bamboo

Bamboo is another available tool for setting Continuous Integration in your environment. Its one of the simplest tools i have come across for building a continuous integration system.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo/

The website shows a 10 minute tutorial which helps in setting up and starting the continuous integration server. The configuration options with this tool are very simple and helps in setting up the environment through the user interface available in this tool.

It has easy integration with build tools like Maven, Ant etc.

Maven

I have been using ant for a pretty long time and i was very comfortable with the flexibility it gives , until i started using Maven. Its almost been a month since i have started using maven , and i feel i will never go back to ant.

Maven works on the principle on "Convention over Configuration" .

Basic convention is each module builds a single artifact and there is a pom file associated with each module which describes all the dependencies required by the module and the properties of the module. The pom file when run can help you do a lot of things like

Compile the code.
Build the Jar
Run the test cases.
Build Java Docs ...etc and many more

Each of the above tasks belong to a particular phase in the Maven build cycle. The best things to use Maven is with a IDE like Eclipse or STS which has complete support for maven.

After i thought about writing the basics of Maven , i came across this blog from spring source which in details explains about the basics of Maven which should be a good starting point.

http://blog.springsource.com/2011/01/17/green-beans-getting-started-with-maven-and-spring/

Maven comes in with easy integration for build tools like Bamboo, Hudson and Cruisecontrol.

Once you start using Maven managing the modules. its version and its dependencies becomes a very simple task.