The good thing about starting a new job is you often encounter lots of useful new things. And of course you keep wondering 'why didn't I use this before??'. So I switched from Ant to Maven. It did make my (developer) life a lot easier. For example I used to write my own ant files to get all the dependencies. Very cumbersome if you have to handle download sites, versions, etc. In Maven it's a breeze. Just add a dependency, and viola, ready to go :-)

Another advantage is the use of Continuum, an automated build system. It reads the Maven configuration file (pom.xml) and will automatically build the whole project for you. This combined with Junit tests this can be very handy for analysis and status reports of your project.

This means I'll have to get my testing act together, and write my Junit tests, again 'why didn't I do this before' :-( Grrrr. Junit test driven development has so much advantages.

Olivier