Difference between Maven and Ant and Jenkins and Hudson

Difference between Maven and Ant and Jenkins and Hudson

Commonly Maven and Ant are java build tools. Main difference between Maven and Ant is Maven supports Dependency Management.You can setup your CI environment using Jenkins or Hudson and automatically build, test and deploy your Java project. Now last, main difference between Jenkins and Hudson, both are originate from same source code but one is closed source while other is open source.

All are Java build tools supports unit testing and project management.The out put of build is .JAR,.WAR or .EAR files.

Main difference between ANT and Maven is that In ANT you need to define every thing i.e. source directory, build directory, target directory etc while Maven adopts principle of Convention over configuration. Which means Maven has predefined project structure i.e. standard directory for source files, test files and resources.

Maven VS Ant:

Maven comes after Ant and it offers more functionality than Ant. The key factors of Maven over Ant are as follows.

1. Versioning managed by bean
2. Maven provides Conventions
3. Extensibility and reusability
4. Better Quality
5. Less Time Spent

Differences:

1. Less Configuration needed.It works on principle of Convention over configuration.
   
2. Maven supports dependency management. All the jar files are stored in a repository.It automatically downloads dependency during build process.But Ant stores it in a ${lib}.
3. Maven offers a consistent and common interface to build Java projects.By looking the pom.xml you can easily understood the path and what are the project dependencies.