I would advise staying away from both Ant and Maven. Use Rake or some other scripting based build system and cut out the XML middleman (this from a long-time Ja

I would advise staying away from both Ant and Maven. Use Rake or some other scripting based build system and cut out the XML middleman (this from a long-time Java coder who's fed up with the impedence mismatch of 'I want to do X, but XML lets me do Y, and I don't have time to write my own Ant task to do it'). But, if you must, use Ant and forget about Maven - way more complex than it needs to be. And, again, if dependency management is a must, look at Ivy.