Reviews and Ratings
As a release engineer I've spent a lot of time with many different build systems from Cruise Control to Lunt Build ... and many, many others. Of all the systems I've used and tested buildbot was the one I loved. Instead of trying to be a Java build system for Ant/Maven where you can hack on older and new languages for building it allows you to script what you want done. This is a huge advantage when your building legacy code, Java code, and younger Python/Ruby code bases.
It also has a decent api to allow you to extend the functionality without spending lots of time trying to figure out how the developers implemented the system.
While it's Web UI does leave something to be desired it gets the job done.
Are you sick of using IDE's that have all kinds of great features on paper but end up getting in your way? No more! Pida has filled that gap for me. Having the Vim editor with surrounding project/buffers plus plug ins for Trac and other stuff has made Pida my favorite IDE.
I've had to fight with ticket and source viewing systems in the past but Trac does it wonderfully. It is true that it's bug tracking is not as detailed as bugzilla or some other bug trackers but it gets the job done. The community around Trac has posted up many plugins, patches, macros and hacks that (can) make Trac fit what you want even more.
It's light weight, simple to administer, and easy to use!
Really. When most people think about their SCM/VCS it's usually in negative terms. 'Why can't subversion do abc?' or 'why does CVS suck?!. With Git I've found myself less worried about how to track my code leaving me more time to actually hack away. While I do agree that those coming from the CVS/SVN world (as I did) do have a learning curve, it is well worth the effort. Once you get over the curve you'll wonder why all SCM/VCS's are not as great as Git.
It's something that you have to stay on top of. A lot of distributions don't package maven 2 and you have to remember that minor releases don't always keep full backwards compatibility. Building from the Maven 2 source doesn't always work depending on the release which makes things a bit tougher for those who would like to offer maven 2 through normal channels.
A lot of shops seem to internally package up binary only versions of maven 2 and then standardized on that version. I've talked with a lot of people who still use maven 2.0.4 so their plugins, custom plugins and packaging continue to work.
With all that being said, it's the best out there for Java.