While coding with JDBC directly provides powerful posibilities I
think no one could argue that it’s better coding at such low level in
the vast majority of the cases.
I think Maven does the same to
build systems. Maven doesn’t substitute Ant, abstracts and simplifies
it. For some cases you’ll still need to write Ant build files inside
Maven, as you can write SQL inside hibernate, but you will have the
power from both worlds.
Maven has made a risky bet, as Hibernate
has done, but fortunately both achieved a growing community. Currently
there are too much people asking for features compared to those
implementing them, so I encourage any of you to take the bull by the
horns and become actively involved.
And you should never forget
that behind high level tools and technologies there’re always low level
ones (Maven – Ant, Hibernate – JDBC, Struts – Servlets,…)
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog 
Exactly. Even existing projects which do not have the “Maven suggested” directory structure can start using Maven. Just write preGoals (basically using Ant tasks copy everything to the Maven directory structure) and then let Maven do what it’s good at. New projects should start using the Maven suggested directory structure. Standards are good, right.
And Maven comes bundled with a lot of other frills or goals in Maven jargon (which people may like or dislike) such as documentation generation, website generation, etc.
I don’t know if I agree. I think Maven takes away too much flexibility. It puts too many constraints on your build structure and process. It does hold an advantage over writing a new build process for every project, but who does that anyway? If you write an Ant build once you can use it over and over. On top of that, your build process conforms to your project, not the other way around.
Bold move with the title… It appears hibernate has been reeling in such amounts of lip service that the downside of appearing to ride on someone else’s good name is shadowed by the potential upside of luring in the clueless.
Anyhow, I do agree with the generic point there. We do need Maven – or more appropriately: something that does the job – but… hibernate is quality stuff, maven and especially struts are not.
If only we’d get something that is to maven what webwork2 is to struts: “the thing done right”. Will it be maven2?
That’s not fair! Hibernate is a well-designed, well implemented piece of software and JDBC is a low-level API that does exactly what you need to access a database and no more. Neither should be tarred with the same brush as Maven and Ant.