Recs.
Updated
Specs
Pros
Pro Declarative
Maven is very opinionated and declarative. This means that most developers will easily understand how your build system works. They don't have to guess which file will end up in the jar
. An IDE can also import any project and easily reason how everything is organized and fits.
Pro Popular
Apache Maven is very popular in the Open Source community. With many open source projects using it as their build tool of choice. Considering that the Open Source community is rather large and usually helpful so there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there written by third-party sources on Maven.
Cons
Con Intransparency (due to declarative model)
The purpose of the tooling is to take away work from the developer. This comes here at the cost of an intransparent realization regarding the internal implementation. While the model may be clear on what should happen, how that happens is less clear and thus in the rare case something does not work as expected it can be a bit hard to understand why at the beginning.