SBT, the Simple Build Tool, is a pretty good step in the right direction for building Scala projects, and I imagine it would work pretty well for plain Java code too.<p>It's been mentioned on the mailing list that Lift, for instance, will eventually move from Maven to SBT when it's functionally complete.<p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/</a>