Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) lets you create a skeletal Web application with a few simple commands. How? By making the author give up some power of choice in how the application is constructed.

This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Choices made by a single developer (especially newbies) rarely reflect best practices.

Now comes Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) which seems to do the same thing for Java apps. Could this be the start of a trend?