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.