Today I wanted to start a prototype portlet and thought that instead of wasting time creating my environment with ant I could use that same time learning maven2 and creating the environment with it.

I used maven for EasyConf and some projects in Germinus so I wasn't expecting it to be hard. Overall I was very pleased with the great improvements of Maven2 over Maven1. In particular I think that idea of defining a lifecycle is just brilliant.

But unfortunately I've also found some annoying problems. First of all the documentation has improved a lot since I first used maven, but it still feels very short. Being used to ant I often found myself with questions to which I couldn't find an answer. After reading some articles I finally found a book about maven written by Vincent Massol et al and sponsored by Mergere. If you want to learn about Maven I strongly recommend starting with it: