"I agree with all your points about what maven lacks. I just don't see those problems being solved by the other tools. Most of their work is just getting on par with maven's base functionality. The community would be well served spending its time adding incremental builds and other actually interesting features to the build tools. Your comment did make me seek out a solution though and I am now testing the incremental-build-plugin. Here is a blog entry about it: http://harshana05.blogspot.com... Version 1.6 under a different package is available and what I am testing with." - Sam Pullara