Yes, Maven is a great tool in my opinion. With automatic dependency management and IDE integration it makes my life so much easier. When I'm justifying includi

Yes, Maven is a great tool in my opinion. With automatic dependency management and IDE integration it makes my life so much easier. When I'm justifying including a third party (open source) library I ignore those that are not build with Maven and whose artifacts are not installed in the central repository. * slow (even with -o to stop it downloading the internet every time) At least you don't have to download everything manually, which is far, far more tedious. I'd rather let it to the tool to download dependencies. * incredibly verbose, in both configuration and output during builds I bet the simplest pom file will be shorter than the equal ant build script. And I personally don't care about output verbosity. * inflexible (but I've not really looked into plugins or advanced configuration) You can easily extend maven builds with ant scripts, which makes Maven as flexible as Ant. *opaque and thinly documented even for basic needs That may be the real issue.