Ant and Maven, a brief comparison
I've been working for the last three years and during this period of time the projects I've been involved with have the same discussion:
which build tool should I use?...and the most common answers were...Ant and Maven
You can check some statistics to see which one is going to rule the market, honestly I think Ant will never leave.
But I must say that there's a very important difference between Ant and Maven, Ant is task-oriented with the possibility of handling project-related configurations. And Maven is project-oriented with the possibility of handling task-related configurations.
Considering that, I have these questions that might help you to decide between the right tool:
Maven
which build tool should I use?...and the most common answers were...Ant and Maven
You can check some statistics to see which one is going to rule the market, honestly I think Ant will never leave.
But I must say that there's a very important difference between Ant and Maven, Ant is task-oriented with the possibility of handling project-related configurations. And Maven is project-oriented with the possibility of handling task-related configurations.
Considering that, I have these questions that might help you to decide between the right tool:
Maven
- Do you need to keep standard project structures?
- Do you want to avoid manual tasks/steps?
- Do your projects have dependencies to another projects/libraries/frameworks?
- Do you have a fairly good Internet connection?
- Do you like to follow the Convention over configuration way?
- Do your projects are very different one from another?
- Do your projects have very different structures?
- Do you customize your projects so they behave in a very specific way?
- Do you already have a tight workspace structure that doesn't fit in the Maven world?
- Do you need to have full control over what your projects do?