I used Maven 1.x for several years for organising and building a product I was working on. For me one of its strongest features is the uniform structure it imposes on a project, meaning a developer who has used maven before can quickly understand how a component fits together and is built. Another is its management of the dependencies a project has, and the shared repository it uses for this. Recently I’ve had an opportunity to start using Maven 2 for building some open source projects I’m looking at. Maven 2 improves on both these features. This is a good introductory article to Maven 2. To delve deeper, check out the free book Better Builds with Maven.