Maven Vs Ant

What is the value proposition of Maven over Ant.
Please explain its relative advantages(or may be Ants disadvantages).
Thanks,
Kishore.

Ant is powerful but is tedious work compared to Maven.
Maven is not as powerful and flexible as Ant, but easy and works out of the box for a lot of J2EE projects.
You dont have to write that boiler plate code every time with Maven.
All the intelligence is built into Maven
I compare Ant to C and Maven to Java (and some people hate when I do that comparison). My reasons for the comparison? Well, same as above. It is finally trade off between raw power v/s flexibility and ease of use.
And contrary to popular opinion - Maven is easy.
Maven Magic - Article on Maven in Server Side

Srikanth,
Thanks for the info.
I am just about getting to your book.
Kishore.

Ant how do you compare Ant vs Ant2?

I'm using Maven on a current project and am very impressed. There is the occasional hiccup but mostly that is due to an out-of-date Maven plugin or something (we had a problem with the Cactus plugin which we sorted by downloading a more recent version from the Cactus site (fixed in Maven as of rc2, btw).

Srikanth, it's my impression that Maven can be extended to do pretty much anything that Ant can do through plugins Link to O'Reilly article. True?

One more question (a bit off-topic), Srikanth. Do you know where one can buy a copy of your Struts Survival Guide in the UK? I tried to find it on Amazon.co.uk and don't believe it was listed. Foyles bookstore didn't have it either, and they are probably the best technical bookstore in the UK.
[ May 14, 2004: Message edited by: Don Stadler ]