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Maven - Is it worth the hype?

I am glad I entered a (somewhat) heated argument with a friend of mine about maven and its' usefulness. My stand was that maven saves developers' life. His stand was otherwise. The points I had were, quick start, arch types, version-ing in repo and a good M2 eclipse plugin. My friend however still believes ant is the best thing ever happened to Java community. He would rather deal with the jars himself than excluding every conflicting jar manually. That lead me researching.

For me the selling points in maven are
  • With Maven archetypes, You can create a project (template) in one command. And voila you are good to go. But this is not a very big selling point, because most times, you just create once.
  • Maven also gives you a way to create a project for different IDEs automatically. This one is very nice, coz you need not check in the classpath and project (config) files into your source control. Also, A new user does not need a setup help since the project structure is familiar and IDE is good to start compiling right away (put m2 plugin in place). Especially when people get familiar with the structure. And yes maven had standardized the layout to a big extent.
  • Maven dependency management and transitive dependency resolution is another feature that saves a 1000 lives. This is one thing the impresses me much. And the one thing that my friend disagrees. To an extent I comply with his disagreement. Because as much as the dependency management is impressive. The conflict resolution is very bad! very very bad. However, My first instinct is that, this should not be every time, happens only at the beginning (setup) or when adding a new dependency. So it is still Okay.

Having said all that, I am huge fan of linux, customisation attracts me. Asking my project to *comply* to a set of rules is not really something I would take as a good thing? So do I like ant. Hell yes. What about maven. What do you think? Is it worth the Hype? So far I do think so.
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