I wish the author had been more specific about how Maven had failed him, especially regarding the "convoluted hackery" he mentions with the pom file... So far,

I wish the author had been more specific about how Maven had failed him, especially regarding the "convoluted hackery" he mentions with the pom file... So far, I haven't had much trouble with Maven. I've only done fairly straightforward web programming, with Spring, Struts 2, and Hibernate. It was a hassle to get it all set up, but I blame Spring for that, not Maven. The conventions seem to work very well, since you can just follow a standard directory structure. I've found it particularly easy to use mvn war:war to create a war file, which is why I wish the author had elaborated a bit on why he needed to "reconfigure the conventions". I have no argument with the author's preference for rake (and rails, for that matter), which is a far more pleasant environment than maven, spring, struts 2 (or something else), and hibernate, but of all this, Maven (I'm talking about Maven 2 here) was by far the most pleasant part of the stack for me. One last thing - I promise I'm not being glib, feigning misunderstanding where I actually disagree. I'm pretty sure the author is a good programmer who has a legitimate gripe, and all I've done is basic CRUD programming with the stack I mentioned... but I definitely would like to hear some details.