In Maven, each project is associate with a pom.xml which stored all the information about the project. This information includes the project reference libraries. To create a new workspace, what you need to do is to check out the source code from svn and maven will get you all the dependencies.

You don’t even need to prepare the ant script for packaging. Maven defines the whole project life cycle. Packging is one of the project life cycle phases. You will find the Maven plugins makes everything so simple.

I am still a newbie on maven so actually what i have mentioned above is just a tip of the iceberg. i would like to share with you the following resources where you can find much more useful information about Maven.

Maven: The Definitive Guide
This is a very good book where you can find out almost everything about Maven. Learning through the sample codes are always much more interesting and efficient and this book makes this very well.

Apache Maven Official Website
This is the offical website of apache maven where you can download Maven with documentation

Nabble – Maven Forum
Ask the professonal Maven users when you can’t find any resources on web. Asking question is always the most important thing in the learning process. =)