I also fought with Maven and discarded it. Two years later I was dreaming of a different kind of build system and started building a prototype. I quit working on it and started using Maven again after I realized that the concepts I now embraced were the philosophy behind Maven.
So either it tooks me a couple years to actually grok the Maven way, or Maven got a hold of me when my mind had gotten to a particular place. Now it seems like second nature and I've got a lot of plugins that allow me to manage my complete life-cycle. It may seem funny, but to a large degree, I even use it like Puppet or Chef.
Take a look at Gradle too.
Re:When being idiomatic wears you out
by ExpiredLink on Saturday August 27, 2011 @01:35PM
(#2931975)
mvn clean install
What's so difficult?
Recently, I jumped back into the Java world to help maintain (read: re-write) an application stack. The last time I used Java, it was done with Ant and Eclipse. This time around, it appears that Maven is the idiomatic babe, and I've been trying to pick it up, to be current.
One of the selling points of Maven, apparently, is that it relies on idiomatic convention. This means that basically it tries to read your mind and do a lot of magic behind the scenes. It dances with you, but you have to know the right dance steps.
Well, let me tell you, after 2 weeks of banging my head against Maven and its sadistic verbosity monster of repository managers, goals, plugins, IDE integrations, and layers of idioms, I'm done. I've got products to ship, and if it means going back to Ant, then that's what I've got to do. I cringe when I think of all the code I could have written in that same amount of time.
Let the Java-build experts laugh at my poor, ignorant schemes.