Best build automation tool-ANT/Maven

[sathya kumar]

Hi all,

I just want to use build automation tool for my project.Finally I concluded to use either ANT or MAVEN.Corporate level which one is more popular?
Browsing shows equal percentage 50-50(Including pros and cons).Suggest any one of the tool.

Thanks in advance.

[Peter Johnson]

At my company, we are currently migrating all of our projects to be Maven-based, primarily because of the support for having a binary repository and automatic handling of dependencies.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Ant is a build tool. Maven is a build and dependency management and ... tool. You could use Ivy to have Ant do more, but if you need what Maven provides, it is probably easier to use Maven.

Another big difference on a day to day basis is that in Ant you program what you want to do and in Maven you declare it.

[Tim Holloway]

If you want to do really complex builds, Ant has the advantage in flexibility. In fact, Maven can invoke Ant.

However, for the most common build processes, such as executable JARs, WARs and EARS, Maven is all that's required in most cases.

Aside from the repository advantages (and I was getting REALLY tired of copying the same old library jars over and over into each new project and filling up my hard drive to boot), the other principal advantage of Maven is that it enforces a standard project layout and build environment.

The major barrier to code reuse in the last big IT shop I worked in was that the other primary Java developing group had a completely different - and somewhat conflicting - build setup and toolkit. They had a homebrew ORM that came from a third group in an office which had been shut down, all the workers laid off or refused to relocate, leaving only one person to support it. Except that he had new duties and didn't have time to. And, worst of all, the other group's code couldn't actually be built stand-alone. You had to have your desktop, IDE, and filesystem virtually cloned from them to do builds.

This was back before any of us had learned to appreciate Maven.