The Maven team is pleased to announce the Beta 4 release!

http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/

Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is
based on the concept of a project object model (POM) in that all the
artifacts produced by Maven are a result of consulting a well defined model
for your project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source
cross-references are all controlled by your POM. 

Maven has many goals, but in a nutshell Maven aims to make the developer's
life easier by providing a well defined project structure, well defined
development processes to follow, and a coherent body of documentation that
keeps your developers and clients apprised of what's happening with your
project. Maven alleviates a lot of what most developers consider drudgery
and lets them get on with the task at hand. This is essential in OSS
projects where there aren't many people dedicated to the task of documenting
and propagating the critical information about your project which is
necessary in order to attract potential new developers and clients.

Changes in this version include:

o Configurable color scheme for the generated web site.  By default,
  Maven uses its own color scheme for generated web sites; however,
  users now have the option of overriding some or all of the color
  selections.
o Support for J2EE (tm) WAR and EAR files being generated as part of the build
  process. 
o WAR file validation has been added, such that a war is verified to be 
  consistent with the web.xml it provides describing its contents
o Extra reporting on project activity has been added. The reports include
  activity by file and developer.
o Nag email address and package were added to the gump descriptor
o The LICENSE.txt file is now added to JARs, WARs and EARs built with Maven
o JUnit tests can be configured to display their output at the console, rather 
  than placed into a file, for easier debugging.
o Maven will now create a separate classpath for unit tests and integration
  unit tests
o All properties used by maven are now prefixed with 'maven.'
o The source code directories were restructured to allow easier development of
  plugins
o Work on validating Struts 1.0 war files was started
o Eclipse plugin for Maven started
o Maven GUI started
o POM updated to allow multiple and various SCMs
o POM simplified to aid in the development of discrete components

Maven is going strong! 15 developers, 114 unit tests, and a staggering
amount of documentation!