Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
I'm not at all trying to start a flame war here, but I'd like to ask, can
anyone enumerate some real, legitimate reasons, as far as you are
concerned at least!, why Maven is better than Ant (or vice-versa if you
feel that way).
I think "Maven is better than Ant" type statements are akin to saying
Java is better than C++. It's not necessarily a statement you can make
across the board. It's just dependent on what you are trying to do and how.
So to answer your question, I'll avoid that type of statement and simply
explain how it's been helpful to me.
1. In my day job we manage a lot of projects that depend on a lot of
3rd party jars. To add a dependency (like commons-digester) we have to
do the following:
* add the dependency to build.propertiesm as follows:
digester.jar=commons.digester-1.6.jar
* add the dependency to the classpath(s) in build.xml
* add the dependency to the "fetchDependencies" target in build.xml to
make sure it gets downloaded.
With maven I simply add a <dependency> tag in project.xml and I'm done.
2. I was working on a project a couple years back where a lot of people
wanted to download and get going. When I was using ant I had to write a
document that explained where all the dependencies were and how to
download them, etc. When I switched to maven, my doc changed to
something like this:
"Install maven according to the installation instructions, switch to the
directory where the code exists and type 'maven'."
It downloaded all dependencies and built the whole project from scratch,
creating deployable artifacts (including web-based documentation). All
I had to do to set it all up was edit a simple project.xml. I could've
done it all with ant, but it would've taken me a much longer time to set up.
3. If you do this a lot, creating new projects is a breeze. Sure, it
could be a breeze with ant if I set everything up, but Maven already has
it set up for me. I just type maven genapp and I'm done.
4. Common things like jar, war, ear, junit, etc. are more easily
defined (IMO) in Maven than in Ant. IOW, it requires less handcoding of
the build script.
5. Multi-project integration is very simple with Maven in my experience.
6. I like the way maven allows me to customize the properties better
than ant. It seems less intrusive to the project artifacts.
None of these things are impossible to do with Ant and none of them are
terribly difficult. But in Maven they are basically already done for
me. As long as I can live with the way maven wants to organize my
project I have to do very little to make things work -- I don't mean I
have to write a lot of easy Ant XML code; I mean I don't have to do
very much *at all.* And I've found that I can usually live with the
way Maven organizes the project. But all that's based on my experience
and I'm sure others have different experience.
Greg
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