Luckily, these days I don't have to work with Maven. :) - But that means I don't have any current Maven code I can distill out as examples. However, I think the blog post does a good job of laying out these problems, particularly the way that incremental compilation sucks in Maven. One example used to be some major issues we had with jasper reports. We had xml files that weren't really jars, that needed to be in a particular directory within the parent war, and had different XML files to use for different clients. So it wasn't as simple as one input, one output. Some files were shared for certain clients, some were client specific. Sometimes we depended on two different files -- one client might have one report1.xml, another client would have a different report1.xml.

This is actually pretty simple with Ant, but becomes a nightmare trying to fit into a Maven structure.

Gotcha, thanks for the response. I think a lot of why Maven doesn't bug me is because I'm not really an "enterprisey" Java/Scala guy, I use it to build more discrete and contained stuff. I had to look up what JasperReports was. :-P But I use it for libgdx projects, for Android stuff, and for just quick one-offs without a hitch. Before Play (which uses SBT, which I'm not thrilled about, but, anyway...) came around I strictly used embedded Jetty--I'd use Dropwizard these days if I was to do that with Maven again, it's great.