Is this fixed in Maven 1.1-beta-X for ant fork=false ? No, I dont use Maven 2 yet. Would it work there ?

I'm sorry but we need to force maven and its plugin to use a known version (for us) of the XML APIs (xml-apis 1.3.03 + xml-resolver 1.1 + xercesImpl 2.8.0). For that we are defining these APIs in the endorsed libraries which create a conflict with your own if you don't fork the JVM.
As said in the issue MAVEN-1425, did you try to use ${pom.getAntProject().setInputHandler(...)} ?

I have (in maven.xml)
<ant:java dir="${basedir}" classname="org.jpox.samples.hello.Main" failonerror="true" fork="false">
<classpath refid="myclasspath"/>
<jvmarg value="-Dlog4j.configuration=file:${basedir}/log4j.properties"/>
</ant:java>

With fork=false I just tried adding your versions of xml-apis, xml-resolver, xercesImpl to project.xml (previously I had nothing specified for those – just entries for my own app jars) and I get
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/reflect/ConstructorAccessorImpl
(using JDK 1.4.2_11)

With fork=true, then it never reads the console input. What do i do to get Ant to read from the console when fork=true ? What do I specify in this setInputHandler ? (in the above maven.xml snippet)

All I want to do is run a sample (Java) app that uses console input via Maven. It works via an Ant task (using fork=false) so I dont see a good reason why not with Maven.

When I bring in other things (like XML parsing) then I get the xml-apis messages. I then add your jars to the dependencies and they get resolved (why I should have to do this is another issue since I haven't specified ANYTHING in project.xml to impose any restriction on XML parsing. I simply selected to run with JDK1.4.2_11 ... all other choices were made by Maven itself. My project.xml contains entries for log4j, jpox, and javax.jdo/jdo2-api ONLY).

I then bring in reflection to my (simple) app. It then gives
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/reflect/ConstructorAccessorImpl
at sun.misc.Unsafe.defineClass(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.ClassDefiner.defineClass(ClassDefiner.java:45)
at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator$1.run(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:381)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator.generate(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:377)
at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator.generateConstructor(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:76)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:30)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:274)
at org.jpox.util.ClassUtils.newInstance(ClassUtils.java:70)

so Maven (1.0.2) is doing something with the CLASSPATH and basic JDK classes (since they are part of the JDK i am using and that Maven is running with) are no longer found whereas they are by using a plain Ant (1.6.1) run with fork=false. This is the issue. [My current JDK is j2sdk1.4.2_11 on Linux]

Let's just forget the fork=true case since I shouldn't have to fork just to get something working

To run with Ant
You need jpox-1.1.0.jar, jdo2-api-2.0.jar, hsqldb-1.8.0.4.jar, log4j-1.2.8.jar in your maven local repo, and set the maven local repo location in build.xml
Type "ant clean compile run", and it runs fine, prompting for input and returning it.

To run with Maven (1.0.2)
Type "maven clean jar run"
Gives java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/w3c/dom/Document
(xml-apis, xml-resolver, xercesImpl are listed as dependencies)

Either there's something I can add to maven.xml/project.xml to get this to work, or something is incorrect in Maven. Maybe there's something I've got wrong in maven.xml ?