Java Projects - Second Edition

Project structure and build tools

The project this time will contain many modules. We will still use Maven in this chapter. We will set up a so-called multi-module project in Maven. In such a project, the directory contains the directories of the modules and pom.xml. There is no source code in this top-level directory. The pom.xml file in this directory serves the following two purposes:

• It references the modules and can be used to compile, install, and deploy all the modules together
• It defines parameters for the modules that are the same for all of them

Every pom.xml has a parent and this pom.xml is the parent of the pom.xml files in the module directories. To define the modules, the pom.xml file contains the following lines:

<modules> ...