I’ve been doing a bit more Googling and seem to have hit onto a few key articles that tie into a web of articles around build systems. There’s certainly a lot more options that I’d originally thought.

Build Tools

• Gant – Not really a build tool itself but an interesting library for scripting ant tasks in Groovy.
• Gradle – Came out of the work on Gant and provides a full build tool with Groovy scripting and leveraging Ant tasks quite heavily under the hood. Uses Ivy for dependency management and promises good things for multi-project builds. Most interestingly though it has transitive dependency support without the need for remote repositories or pom/ivy files.
• Schmant – Aims to be comparable to Ant in features but nicer and easier to work with. Uses Java 6 scripting to let you use a wide range of languages to script the build, but the sample build files look a little complex still. Most interesting is the TaskExecutor support for running different build tasks in parallel threads – not sure if it’s easier to use than ant’s parallel task though.
• Apache Buildr – rake for Java I guess. Could also be described as maven done right – the build files are kind of POM like, but are actually full ruby classes. I played with this one a bit and it’s very impressive, though its transitive dependency support is still a bit immature.

Maven Info

Also stumbled across some good Maven articles:

• How Atlassian uses Maven
• Don Brown “Fixing Maven 2” and Don’s blog starting from Making Maven 2 not suck