Maven: a lot better then Ant

Maven is a software tool for Java project management and build automation similar in functionality to the Apache Ant. Now a days a lot of open source java project are using Maven.
Some of the main features are:-

• Making the build process easy and it is network-ready
• A way to share JARs across several projects
• Providing guidelines for best practices development i.e. to write unit test
• Creates common configuration for eclipse for users of same project.
• more...

To get started go here http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html
also checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Maven


A sample web project would look like
/project-name
/project-name/src/main/java
/project-name/src/main/resources
/project-name/src/test/java
/project-name/src/test/resources
/project-name/pom.xml
/project-name/src/main/webapp/project-name/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF

Some of the commands i use

mvn eclipse:eclipse
mvn clean
mvn install
more ...