Why do we need Maven or Ant, if we already have Eclipse?

Question

I think this question is an extension of Compare to the IDE for Java,do we still need Ant?

There are answers for the question above, but I wish to know a concrete ex

Answer 1

There are soo many advantages to using Ant or Maven.

Maven is more or less an update concept of Ant. Instead of giving you a bullet point answer I have decided to take another approach into answering this question. I'll ask you a simple question. I'am assuming here that you would be a developer; or have some sort of OO programming background.

So If your manager was to ask you to copy two hundred directories, but ignore jar, war and ear files within those directories and once copied. You then deploy those two hundred directories to another destination but deploy only .class files; copy rest of the files into another destination etc.

For you to do this in java; it will be lots of logic, lots of code and would not be extensible or adaptable to change. So that in mind Ant or Maven will accomplish and prepare all this on the fly with less overhead for your application to use. The size of the code in ant or Maven will be 1/4 compare to Java.

Click on the links for more technical benefits:

Maven

Ant I could not find an authentic answer with benefits, but I'm sure this would convince you ;)