The Maven team is pleased to announce the Beta 5 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 Jelly is now used for all XML scripting instead of Ant build files
which still provides Ant semantics but provides greater flexibility in
processing your builds.

o Plugins can now be packaged in JARs and dropped into your Maven
installation to add new functionality to your builds.

o IBiblio is now being used as a primary Maven repository providing high
availability, reliability and bandwidth.

o The bootstrap process will now work correctly behind a http proxy.

o Gump integration is a lot closer to being reliable using the Gump
plug-in.

o Vanilla Ant build files can be generated using the Ant plug-in.

o The Reactor, which is a tool that allows you to process an arbitrary
set of projects, is in its first working form. There is a Reactor in the
Commons that will build all the Commons projects and generate an entire
site for the Commons. Workflow and scheduling will be added to the
Reactor for b6.

You can find the Maven distributions here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/maven/distributions/