When you first experience Maven, it's like the cinematic cliché of two lovers running across a grassy field to embrace: It takes care of getting the right JARs for you, keeps test and build dependencies separate, and generates configuration artifacts for your favorite IDE, too. Even though it's XML, it's still a sweet five-minute user experience, but then you start stepping on the rakes in the grass:
"Hmmm. Doesn't look like Emma is supported by Maven2, so I'll give Cobertura a shot." THWAP! The current version of the plugin is broken, but downgrading to an earlier version appears to work.
"Looks like TestNG support only extends to version 4.7, but maybe my tests written against 5.5 will still work." THWAP! It turns out that up to date support for TestNG is a bit of a can of worms. (I would have tried the 2.8-SNAPSHOT version, but the pom was broken.)
"Oh well. I can switch to JUnit4 and do without data providers, make @BeforeClass methods static, and replace dependency-driven order of execution by some hand-coded magic." THWAP! The documentation doesn't explicitly state that the current version of the Surefire plugin is for JUnit 3.8 only, but it is. Adding the Apache plugin snapshot repository and using the 2.3-SNAPSHOT version of the plugin gets things working. (Of course, then it also turns out that IDEA 6 doesn't support JUnit 4.2.)
This is no worse than dealing with dependencies and working directories in Ant, so I'm happy enough with Maven in the relatively green-field environment that I'm working in. I can see where trying to bend an existing project, especially a large one, to Maven could quickly become a fool's errand.
I have to admit that I looked closely at Maven in its version 1 incarnation, but it flunked the five minute test. (Among other things, I was never able to grok how the "reactor" worked for multi-module builds.) Maven 2, thanks to the Apache site and the book and examples from Mergere, gets over that hump. (FiveSight had a home-grown multi-module build system built on top of Ant, but it didn't do an especially good job of rolling-up reporting or of managing conflicts in transitive dependencies (lib A version C requires lib B version D, but lib E requires lib B version F).)
I do like where Matthieu is headed with raven or Russel Winder is headed with gant, but I'd really like the two together: non-XML syntax, dependency management, fully-stocked and up-to-date repositories, well-supported by continuous integration systems, and works with everything that Ant works with. Maybe gant plus the Maven2 Ant tasks or Ivy is the most silver-ish bullet for the time being, but seeing as I don't need to shoot any werewolves, Maven fits the bill for the moment.
