Yeah, it's not a big one, certainly. In practice, you'll almost never do it from scratch, but use an archetype [1] that you tweak. Tools like Ivy, Gradle and B

Yeah, it's not a big one, certainly. In practice, you'll almost never do it from scratch, but use an archetype [1] that you tweak. Tools like Ivy, Gradle and Buildr will play nicely with Maven repositories to get dependencies, and I would hazard were all largely born out of a frustration with the pom syntax. That said, like it or, more likely, not, Maven is the defacto Java standard, so it tends to cling on. [1]: http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-archetypes.html http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-...