As Ant was created to overcome the shortages of make, Maven was created with a similar intention—to overcome the shortages of Ant. You may recall that make could not guarantee build portability because the commands make executes are arbitrary shell commands that may be system specific. An Ant build, if all the tasks are available on the classpath, is portable as long as Java runs the same way on the different platforms.
The problem with Ant is a bit different. When you download the source code of a project and you want to build, what will the command be? You should ask Ant to list all the targets and select the one that seems to be the most suitable. The name of the task depends on the engineer who crafted the build.xml file. There ...
