Why maven? What are the benefits? [closed]

Question

What are the main benefits of using maven compared to let's say ant ? It seems to be more of a annoyance than a helpful tool. I use maven 2, with plain Eclipse Java EE (no m2eclipse), and tomcat.

Supporters of maven believe that

1. Maven lets you get your package dependencies easily

2. Maven forces you to have a standard directory structure

In my experience

1. Figuring out package dependencies is really not that hard. You rarely do it anyway. Probably once during project setup and few more during upgrades. With maven you'll end up fixing mismatched dependencies, badly written poms, and doing package exclusions anyway.

2. Slow FIX-COMPILE-DEPLOY-DEBUG cycle, which kills productivity. This is my main gripe. You make a change, the you have to wait for maven build to kick in and wait for it to deploy. No hot deployment whatsoever.

Or am I just doing it wrong ? Please point me to the right direction, I'm all ears.

Answer 1

Maven can provide benefits for your build process by employing standard conventions and practices to accelerate your development cycle while at the same time helping you achieve a higher rate of success. For a more detailed look at how Maven can help you with your development process please refer to The Benefits of Using Maven.

Answer 2

Maven can be considered as complete project development tool not just build tool like Ant. You should use Eclipse IDE with maven plugin to fix all your problems.

Here are few advantages of Maven, quoted from the Benefits of using Maven page:

Henning

• quick project setup, no complicated build.xml files, just a POM and go
• all developers in a project use the same jar dependencies due to centralized POM.
• getting a number of reports and metrics for a project "for free"
• reduce the size of source distributions, because jars can be pulled from a central location

Emmanuel Venisse

• a lot of goals are available so it isn't necessary to develop some specific build process part contrary to ANT we can reuse existing ANT tasks in build process with antrun plugin

Jesse Mcconnell

• Promotes modular design of code. by making it simple to manage mulitple projects it allows the design to be laid out into muliple logical parts, weaving these parts together through the use of dependency tracking in pom files.
• Enforces modular design of code. it is easy to pay lipservice to modular code, but when the code is in seperate compiling projects it is impossible to cross pollinate references between modules of code unless you specifically allow for it in your dependency management... there is no 'I'll just do this now and fix it later' implementations.
• Dependency Management is clearly declared. with the dependency management mechanism you have to try to screw up your jar versioning...there is none of the classic problem of 'which version of this vendor jar is this?' And setting it up on an existing project rips the top off of the existing mess if it exists when you are forced to make 'unknown' versions in your repository to get things up and running...that or lie to yourself that you know the actual version of ABC.jar.
• strong typed life cycle there is a strong defined lifecycle that a software system goes thru from the initiation of a build to the end... and the users are allowed to mix and match their system to the lifecycle instead of cobble together their own lifecycle.. this has the additional benefit of allowing people to move from one project to another and speak using the same vocabulary in terms of software building

Vincent Massol

• Greater momentum: Ant is now legacy and not moving fast ahead. Maven is forging ahead fast and there's a potential of having lots of high-value tools around Maven (CI, Dashboard project, IDE integration, etc).

Answer 3

Maven is one of the tools where you need to actually decide up front that you like it and want to use it, since you will spend quite some time learning it, and having made said decision once and for all will allow you to skip all kinds of doubt while learning (because you like it and want to use it)!

The strong conventions help in many places - like Hudson that can do wonders with Maven projects - but it may be hard to see initially.

edit: As of 2016 Maven is the only Java build tool where all three major IDEs can use the sources out of the box. In other words, using maven makes your build IDE-agnostic. This allows for e.g. using Netbeans profiling even if you normally work In eclipse