Why

RapidMiner is currently build with ant; so why should one use Maven. Currently if you want to use RapidMiner in your project:

you will spend at least half an hour setting up a project on eclipse (instructions)
- no easy way to use other IDE’s e.g. the superior IntelliJ

With maven including RapidMiner is a matter of adding several lines to your pom.xml and then everything just works. Updating to a newer version is just a matter of changing the version number in pom.

Note: I hope that great folks at RapidMiner will one day use maven (although porting their 1k+ lines ant build file is not so straightforward). For now, hopefully the hack bellow will help others who want to use RapidMiner with maven in their projects.