No, WAR file generation in ant isn’t hard at all (it’s got its own task, after all). I didn’t mention it because I had to jump through hoops to implement it. It was just another one of those things that was handled automagically by maven that I had to address explicitly in ant, even if said address is trivial.

As for dependency management tools like Ivy and Savant, I think their original raison d’être is to assist with multi-project builds, where different projects may require different versions of the same tool.

For me, I like Ivy merely as an organizational tool for dependencies. Currently, our application uses more than 40 3rdparty jars. Many of them are not used by our application directly, but rather as dependencies of dependencies (ad infinitum). With Ivy, I now have a full accounting of what libraries our project relies on directly. The latest version of Ivy even has graphing and reporting capabilities, so you can see visually the fanout of dependencies for your project.

Sure, I could just check all the jars in. And I may do that, after I implement a subversion resolver for Ivy. But after some initial configuration, I find that having Ivy handle this to be worth the effort. We now have clear understanding of our dependency tree, rather then relying on ad-hoc documentation to figure out, for example, why exactly we’re deploying commons-codec again…

I also dont get the whole hype around automatic jar dependency mechanisms like ivy. I am still checking my jars into my repository and so far things are ok with that approach. Perhaps there is something i am fundamentaly missing on that topic.

Perhaps i am a moron too

However, I say this without ever having seen an .ipr or .iws file.

Thanks, but war file generation is covered. I’ve got the essentials down great. Things like the ‘idea’ target for generating IDEA files with all the dependencies, and the ’site’ target for generating web pages that show all the various reports, are the standard maven targets that are still missing from my new ant build.