The choice of build tools is surprisingly contentious. I know I, personally, am not a huge maven fan. I've been given to explosive, vitriolic rants against it, actually. But now I'm forced to use it at work so I'm learning it more than I'd hoped to ever have to. :)  But whatever your choice of build tool is, there's one thing I think should happen that would help out so many people.  If you write some form of library to be reused by the world at large, it should get published in the maven repos.  Or maybe an ivy repo(s) if there are such centralized/public beasts.  Making it easy to find these artifacts will only help to drive adoption of a project. Whether you chose maven or ant at that point (or something else...), it becomes quite simple to find and fetch dependencies.  I use the ant tasks from the maven project to pull down my deps and then ant to build.  It works well enough for me until I run into a library that hasn't been published to a repository somewhere.  Some projects are really good about publishing their artifacts.  Other projects' devs respond with simple "not my problem" responses.  If I can't find a dependency in maven, I'm much more likely to try to find another library to use.  So uploading an artifact may not be your problem, but it's certainly not mine.  It's a good way to drive people like me to other projects, though.  But maybe you don't care about that, either.