Enterprise-level projects typically depend on a variety of open source libraries. Consider the scenario where you want to use Log4J for your application logging. To accomplish this, you would go to the Log4J download page, download the JAR file, and put it in your project’s lib folder or add it to the project’s class path. There are a couple of problems with this approach:
- 1.
The JAR file you downloaded might depend on a few other libraries. You would now have to hunt down all of those dependencies (and their dependencies) and add them to your project.
- 2.
When the time comes to upgrade ...
