I am in the process of evaluating Maven or ANT as the company standard. I would appreciate your thoughts on the same.

Here is what I think so far:

The benefits of Maven with dependency management, enforcement of package structure, a common developer known standard for development and also support by ever major vendor, makes a strong case for it. Also Maven provides good UI for the management, out of the box. If any complexity is not handled by Maven, you can always invoke ANT tasks using the ANT plugin. It will also make it easy to start new java projects…

Can anyone share any specific instances where you had to use ANT, where Maven fell short.

Found some relevant links:

Maven v/s ANT -

http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/maven_vs_ant

http://www.javafaq.nu/java-article1168.html

http://javamoods.blogspot.com/2010/02/maven-vs-ant-stop-battle.html

Thanks in advance,

Mandeep Khambay

We use Ant because it's quite simple to write a buildscript with ant and the biggest issue was the standard maven directory structure.

But on the other hand the dependency solution of maven is quit nice to have.  I think that all depends on the environment you are in. We have a lot of junior java developers and there for we decided to go for the simplest solution -> ant.

Thanks Robby. Actually its even simpler with Maven, you don't have to write much as compared to ANT. Also the directory structure enforces some good practices. Did you have anything special you were doing with ANT buildscript that Maven couldn't?? I am looking for some specific examples. 

Also has anyone used the C plus plus, C sharp and Flex plugins for Maven? Anyone has any experience with it. Any issues faced??

Thanks,

Mandeep Khambay

I had good experience with ant and few with maven, so for me it was an obvious choice but I'm sure you can do everything with Maven.

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