What's the best building tool for java besides ant?

Somehow I don't like IDE very much,

but I don't find a particular good tool to开发者_JS百科 build java applications from source yet.

I welcome all kinds of feedbacks!

Maven is another alternative, but I don't know that I'd call it "best".

Ant has the virtue of simplicity if used properly. I find Maven to be heavier and less penetrable.

Ant and Maven are to two alternatives that are usually used. What is considered best will differ from project to project and also often developer to developer also.

You several have other option like Gant and Gradle. My personl favorite is Gradle, since it uses Groovy syntax and offers the benefits of Maven without forcing you to do anything.

Besides ant, there's:

• Maven
• Gradle
• Buildr

I use ant and maven; ant is fine for what it does, and maven… it's OK if you can manage to swallow how it works. No experience with the other two.

If you are a masochist, you can use good old Make to build Java. Its what most folks used before Ant. But Ant is better. It is more powerful, more portable and (in my experience) quicker.

Definite better alternative to ant (and a good successor) is Maven.

Maven has advantages over ant, and the plugin development for Maven is going on at a rapid pace.

Advantages of Maven (over ant you can say)

1. Dependencies are downloaded automatically
   
2. Standardized, very consistent layout
   
3. Standardized, very consistent naming
   
4. Code coverage
   
5. Extensive reports
   
6. maven easily works with JUnit tests
   

Initial couple of hours would be tricky, but once you get accustomed and see the advantages, you would not go back to ant ;-)