[kyllo]

Usually somebody jams some sort of runner into a Maven project as a different build step or something

Like this? http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/

[eropple]

If you're lucky. I've seen a lot more home-rolled ones in Java.

[kyllo]

Yeah... I've also worked on corporate Java projects with no Ant, Maven, nor hand-rolled substitute, where the build process was to download the dependencies' jars from the internet manually into /lib.