Maven Tonight
Alan Wang of Connectria will talk about Maven tonight at the St. Louis Java Users Group.
Come on down to One City Place in Creve Coure. It's free and the session starts at 6:30pm.
The PowerPoint is here.
Update: The PDF is here.
Update: After the talk, I'm still not convinced that Maven will replace Ant for anything more complicated than a 2-bean project. This might be psychological: I worked on my Ant build scripts for many hours so I have a level of familiarity with it (and also an attachment). My build does a lot of wierd things such as unzipping an EJB jar, modifying its deployment descriptors, rezipping it and then include it in the EAR, or token replacements in property files, or invoking an Expect script to deliver artifacts to various servers. I doubt Maven would allow me to do all that without custom scripts. And I'm afraid that I would have to relearn how to do all these things in Maven.
The whole POM thing also scares me a little. We are going OO where transparency is absolutely the key. How would you "web developers" think if all of a sudden you were told your HTML pages are too repetitive, and your pages are all going to inherit from other pages, and "all you have to do is to override the part that you want to customize"? It wouldn't be "web development" any more, would it?