John Todd wrote:Jeanne,
What is your favorite Java build tool? because seriously, I don't like any.
The community should do a better job in this area IMHO.
I don't have one either. I like gradle, but I've only played with it on something trivial (and not a real prject.) Which means I haven't hit any of the annoying real world scenarios. Ant and Maven are both perfectly fine for a simple project without any plugins.
I've used Ant for a lot longer with Maven. And I've written many plugins for Ant. For Maven I wrote one trivial plugin and am currently struggling with my first real/complex one. I find the documentation/resources for Ant to be better. Maybe because it is older?
Maven is great when it works. I like the dependency management/transitive dependencies. I like how you have a hierarchy of POMs. It's still maddening when something doesn't work. Or when you have to figure out what an (undocumented) convention is that Maven is relying on. Hopefully as I gain more experience with Maven I will have less of these moments. However, that's not a strong selling point.