[berlinbrown]

If you look at the practical real-world environments, Maven beats out most other approaches for large projects. I think you have three or four different build setups. I prefer Maven for large projects and Ant for small projects. Up votes for the person that makes working, maintainable, easy to read and modify maven scripts. (not you Spring or JBoss).

Anyway, you have three levels of builds.

- Complex Perl scripts, bash/unix scripts : these people are insane and generally have degrees in physics and mathematics. They write scripts that are unreadable, can't modify, are cryptic and I imagine that that the authors can't read them. I sometimes see these in old Linux programs.

- Complex Make, Autoconf, bash/unix scripts : A little better than the perl build scripts but still a complex because you have to understand each command used. I am not fan and never was a C/C++ developer. I guess these are still used in the non-Java world. I am looking at you 'OpenJDK/Sun JDK'

- Complex Ant scripts : These aren't bad, easy read, a little bit difficult to maintain over time. I think most developers prefer Maven but don't mind an Ant script if the project is small

- Maven Scripts : I think people use maven because not much else exists. And the problem of compiling code is not that serious as the actual application development.

[chrismaeda]

I've had the opposite experience. I've converted 2-3 complex build systems implemented in different flavors of make to ant. It's tedious but it's doable. And once you get to ant, it's a lot easier to maintain compared to make.

I looked at maven a couple time but could never figure out how to convert a make-based build to maven because there is always a bunch of weird hacks lurking in the makefile. However, I do see how maven would be fine for a new project.

[cbsmith]

Honestly, make based projects are generally infinitely easier to parse and manipulate than Maven. Maven helps by providing a fixed organizational structure that is immediately familiar (and this is the advantage of being opinionated that I do think the article understates), but you can keep the structure and use make and be much better for it.