I feel your pain. Recently, I jumped back into the Java world to help maintain (read: re-write) an application stack. The last time I used Java, it was done w

I feel your pain. Recently, I jumped back into the Java world to help maintain (read: re-write) an application stack. The last time I used Java, it was done with Ant and Eclipse. This time around, it appears that Maven is the idiomatic babe, and I've been trying to pick it up, to be current. One of the selling points of Maven, apparently, is that it relies on idiomatic convention. This means that basically it tries to read your mind and do a lot of magic behind the scenes. It dances with you, but you have to know the right dance steps. Well, let me tell you, after 2 weeks of banging my head against Maven and its sadistic verbosity monster of repository managers, goals, plugins, IDE integrations, and layers of idioms, I'm done. I've got products to ship, and if it means going back to Ant, then that's what I've got to do. I cringe when I think of all the code I could have written in that same amount of time. Let the Java-build experts laugh at my poor, ignorant schemes.