The Apache Maven development team has announced the release of version 2.0 Beta 1. Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

This release is considered stable with a feature set comparable to Maven 1.0. Further betas and the final are expected to be backwards compatible, with a primary goal of bugfixes, usability improvements, and documentation.

- Further improved dependency management: full support for dependency ranges
- Reactor project aggregation support and summary
- File system discovery of POMs and artifacts to reduce build time and use of local and remote repositories
- Repository metadata support
- System scope dependency support
- Eclipse compiler support, ability to fork compiler
- Ability to automatically bundle sources and javadoc with deployments
- Maven 1.x repository support
- Allow use of setters in mojos for field population
- Ability to separate snapshot repository
- Ability to set minimum Maven version requirement for projects and plugins
- Build extension support
- Bugfixes and enhancements

To read more visit http://maven.apache.org/