Dave Johnson on why he’s migrating his build scripts for Roller from Ant to Maven:

I was a Maven hater and resisted it for a long time but over the years Maven has gotten much better, it’s well supported in IDEs and as far as I can tell, Maven has replaced Ant as the de facto build system for Java projects. If you want new developers be able to easily build, debug and run your code via command or their favorite IDE then Maven is the way to go, and that’s especially true for open source projects like Roller.

This is my impression as well. I started to create a new, open source Java application the other day, and it occurred to me that for the build script, I should use Maven because it seems like that’s the way everybody is handling dependency management these days. Dave’s post is one more indication that I was probably right about that.