Introduction to Maven

Maven is a great software which can do magic tricks. Maven is tool that has been manufactured to meet the challenges of development. Over time, developers have noticed that tasks like downloading and import libraries, the compilation of Java classes, deleting files from archives, making archives or other files were made on each project. These tasks are repetitive from one project to another and are expensive. They do not add much from a functional point of view. It was then that the developers have thought of a tool that is capable of performing all these tasks. Maven was born.

Apache Maven is a free software tool for management and automation of production Java software in general and in particular Java EE projects. The objective is similar to Make Unix system: produce a software from source, optimizing the tasks performed for this purpose and to ensure the smooth production order.

It is similar to the Ant tool, but provides more simple means of configuring them as XML-based format. Maven is managed by the Apache Software Foundation. Previously, Maven was a branch of the Jakarta Project organization.

Maven uses a paradigm known as Project Object Model (POM) to describe software project dependencies with external modules and the sequence for its production. It comes with a large number of pre-defined tasks, such as compiling Java code or its modularization.

Maven is a valuable tool that is gaining much ground. It is also a young tool, but whose evolution is remarkable.

A key element and relatively specific Maven is its ability to function as a network. A historical motivations of this tool is to provide a way to synchronize separate projects publication standardized information vending jar modules. Thus in the basic version, Maven can dynamically download material from known software warehouses. And it offers seamless synchronization of modules required.

Maven1 Maven2 and have been developed in parallel, but future versions will be based on the structure of the second version. The following sections of the article deal primarily Maven2.

 Maven provides features:

Construction compilation  (Maven)
documentation  (Maven)
report  (Maven)
Dependency Management  (Maven)
Source management  (Maven)
Updated Project  (Maven)
unfolding  (Maven)