I started using the new 7.0 release of IntelliJ IDEA a couple of days ago and I'm loving the support for creating projects based on Eclipse or Maven project files.

I've had some exposure to Maven in the past but have only recently started using it myself. Maven doesn't really do anything that I couldn't already do using Ant but it does mean I no longer have to spend time setting up large Ant build files each time I start a new project and it also reduces the size of my subversion repositories now that third party dependencies are stored in my Maven repository.

One of the most compelling reasons for moving to Maven though is the release management process. Again, it doesn't do anything that I wasn't already doing manually but it really simplifies the process of building releases and tagging them in source control and also enforces it to a degree i.e. unit tests must pass before it will let you create a release.

I'm certainly going to use Maven for all future simple jar/war projects but I haven't yet tried using Maven on more complex projects that have lots of ant tasks. However, Maven can be invoked from Ant so I'm sure it won't be an issue.