Netbeans 7 has gone into beta, which is cool, but it also supports Maven 3 now. In an interview with Jesse Glick on dzone, he says that maven is a better build tool for IDEs than groovy or ant.

He says that Maven declares what the project contains and uses instead of being a script in some procedural language, which means the IDE can effectively read the POM and know what to present to the user.

He points out maven's repository and dependency system, but that's going to be the same in most build tools now, they've all more or less copied maven's capabilities if they haven't done better.

It's interesting, there's a whole "use maven" thing going on, but nobody's pointed out the IDE support and why it's easier to do with maven than with gradle or whatever.

Gradle is based on a extendible, declarative DSL. We are not talking about raw Groovy here. Such a DSL is very well-suited for IDE support. It just needs to be done :). Fortunately there are now serious efforts on the way for Eclipse (I hope also soon for IntelliJ).

The whole point of a DSL is to avoid procedural scripting. This is independent of the fact whether the DSL is an internal or external one. 

Hans Dockter | Founder, Gradle

http://www.gradle.org