just today i replaced maven with ivy + a few scripts to build a java project i'm working on. it is so much better. ivy just for downloading the dependencies,

just today i replaced maven with ivy + a few scripts to build a java project i'm working on. it is so much better. ivy just for downloading the dependencies, the scripts for building and running. the scripts are easier to read and understand. the builds run much faster (incremental builds + starting go from 25s to 5s). i appreciate maven's downloading of dependencies. but ivy does that too, only better: it generates a classpath list of the deps for me, to use when building and running. maven does also handle builds, but it does so poorly. it is huge, overcomplex, slow. things that are easy on the command-line, are hard/weird to do with a maven pom.xml. the phases, lifecycles, goals, encoded in their xml format. so much stuff for so little gain. i've recently spent hours figuring out how to get my javadoc+doclet invocation in a format that maven understood (running it on a command-line was relatively easy; to get it to work in maven easily i ended up committing a compiled version of the doclet). it baffles me maven is used so widely. i think java developers have a high tolerance (and often even love for) the unnecessarily complicated... that, or they haven't seen and can't imagine better ways.