Sorry for the delay

I know I promised you some information about Ivy and I am really, really late.
But studies and watching the European Soccer Championship consumed lots of time.
And right now, I am back at learning some Python and I gotta admit (again) that

a = []

looks much more elegant than

List<Object> a = new ArrayList<Object>();

Of course the compact list syntax is a feature and Groovy e.g. has the same ability.

And now to the promised Ivy part (it won't be long, because I don't want to duplicate the tutorial, which can be found here):
For me, Ivy is quite straightforward with its ivy.xml and the dependencies in there and the ivy.xml looks like the dependencies in a Maven POM.
Also adding <ivy:retrieve/> to your build.xml shouldn't be too complicated ;)
Having different repositories like Maven is also possible.
And, what I recently found out is, that Gradle and SBT work with Ivy, too.

So, give it a try.