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I would advise staying away from both Ant and Maven. Use Rake or some other scripting based build system and cut out the XML middleman (this from a long-time Java coder who's fed up with the impedence mismatch of 'I want to do X, but XML lets me do Y, and I don't have time to write my own Ant task to do it').

But, if you must, use Ant and forget about Maven - way more complex than it needs to be. And, again, if dependency management is a must, look at Ivy.

Yeah Maven has been a tough road to say the least. Some time soon I want to just sit down and go through some of the maven tutorials/docs out there and lock in on getting comfortable with it, since it seems so popular.

Throw Maven the hell away - ant is more than powerful enough for your needs and really simple to extend.