The Apache Maven has announced the second alpha release of Maven 2.0. Developers may download it from:

http://maven.apache.org/maven2/download.html

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 includes 76 bug fixes and enhancements since the first release on April 8:

http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10500&fixfor=11020

Maven 2.0 is a rewrite of the popular Maven application to achieve a number of goals, and to provide a stable basis to take it into the future.  While it can be considered quite stable, and future versions are now expected to retain a high amount of backwards compatibility, this is still a technology preview, and not yet complete or considered ready for a production environment.

The development team reports that main new features in this release include:

    * Basic site generation
    * Improved error handling
    * Automatic plugin updates
    * Published Mojo and Plugin API
    * Inclusion of Ant tasks for Maven 2.0

This release is expected to be much more architecturally stable, making early adoption a possiblity, team members believe. At this point, there are still only the core plugins available.

Other important links provided by the team include:
    * the web site: http://maven.apache.org/maven2/
    * the maven-user mailing list: http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html
    * Maven Blogs: http://www.mavenblogs.com/