What are the main benefits of using maven compared to let's say ant ? It seems to be more of a annoyance than a helpful tool. I use maven 2, with plain Eclipse Java EE (no m2eclipse), and tomcat.
Supporters of maven believe that
Maven lets you get your package dependencies easily
Maven forces you to have a standard directory structure
In my experience
Figuring out package dependencies is really not that hard. You rarely do it anyway. Probably once during project setup and few more during upgrades. With maven you'll end up fixing mismatched dependencies, badly written poms, and doing package exclusions anyway.
Slow FIX-COMPILE-DEPLOY-DEBUG cycle, which kills productivity. This is my main gripe. You make a change, the you have to wait for maven build to kick in and wait for it to deploy. No hot deployment whatsoever.
Or am I just doing it wrong ? Please point me to the right direction, I'm all ears.