Using Ant for Cometd

[Bhanu]

Hi,

I am starting up on a new project which uses cometd. Reading the documents I feel that cometd heavily uses Maven for building and deployment. Since I am not much familiar with Maven, can you tell me what are the advantages of using Maven here ? I am considering using Ant since I am already familiar with it. Would I be lacking some cometd features if I don't use Maven? 

Thanks,

Bhanu