The Apache Software Foundation has posted the second beta of Maven 1.1, an open source build tool for Java that's more declarative and less procedural than Ant. Maven is also much more authoritarian and less configurable than Ant.
The 1.1 release focuses on the following objectives:
- Integration of Maven 2 technologies such as Maven Wagon, Maven SCM and the new model code
- Apache Ant 1.6.5 support, including forkmode="once"
- Upgrade to later releases of dependencies, in particular Jelly
- Significant improvements in memory usage
- Improved POM layout
- Bugfixes
With just a few exceptions [1], Maven 1.1 is backwards compatible with Maven 1.0.
I've been using Maven lately as part of my work with the Jaxen project, and it has some nice features; but I really can't recommend it. It's too controlling. If your build process doesn't look like what Maven wants it to look like, you're going to be fighting against it. Maven's probably a little easier to set up than Ant for basic tasks like build, test, and deploy. However, as soon as you want to do something a little different than Maven expects, you're S.O.L. It's really Maven's way or the highway.