As a Ruby developer, my first impulse was to use Rake but I started with Maven, trying to follow the bigger players, and I found myself struggling with managing various Maven dependencies and settings instead of focusing on getting the things done. Then I switched to Ant when I discovered the difference it makes when deploying to Heroku. Mu's compiled slug size deployed with Maven was 57Mb while the same core deployed with Ant today is 11.7Mb, give or take.
I'll commit the Maven configuration files soon, it is not my intention not too, but I will still search for a better solution. Any suggestions? Thank you for your feedback!
When compared to, for instance, NPM or Ruby Gems, I can't honestly say I've found much to like about the Java ecosystem. Part of the problem, of course, is that unlike in the case of the aforementioned two, build & dependency management in Java-land is quite fragmented (ant, maven, gradle, etc.).
At the end of the day, though, I'd be happy working in a Java framework wherein the experience didn't feel like I was forcing myself to write Java code. It's just such an uphill battle when the dev experience of (rails/node/django/webapp/web.py) is radically different from just about everything Java has to offer. The lack of a sane package manager, for one, is a major downer.