I was going to post a comment on Dion’s blog about his
entry on Maven
when I realized that Mike posted it for me…

In short, ant‘s <import> and <macrodef> are absolute life savers.  They
have brought a lot of sanity into my build files, which I thought were already
pretty lean and mean:

  • All my build files have shrunk a lot thanks to <macrodef> ("extract
    method").
  • All the targets contain fewer commands, and they clearly state their
    intent thanks to well-chosen names ("keep methods short").
  • The macros contain a set of sensible defaults that make most of their
    invocation straightforward and with rarely more than a couple of parameters
    ("program for the default case").

These rules of thumbs coupled with the following simple guidelines:

  • Everything that may vary from an installation to another should go into
    a build.properties, all the rest goes into your build file.
  • Break down your build files logically (e.g. I like to have all the
    macros defined in build-macros.xml and <import> it everywhere I need it).

… give me a feeling of empowerment and control over my infrastructure.

Another important point is that I only need to know two languages to find my
way in ant (Java and ant‘s XML) while Maven requires me to
learn four different languages:  Java, ant‘s XML, Maven’s XML
and…  gulp… Jelly.

I still like the idea behind Maven but even today, when I see that the same
criticisms we were hearing two years ago still crop up on a regular basis, it
doesn’t make me very confident on my ability to diagnose Maven meltdowns.