Job Ready Java

Lesson 37Introducing Maven

We have been using Maven to build our projects in NetBeans, but we have not discussed the advantages of using Maven over the build management tools that are built into the IDE. The IDE tools work reasonably well for small, individual projects that don't depend on too many external libraries, but they have the following drawbacks for larger, multideveloper projects:

• Everyone on the team must use NetBeans.
• All external JAR files must be referenced directly in the project and must be manually copied to each developer's machine.
• There is no good way to manage the versions of the required external libraries.
• There is no way to build the project outside of NetBeans. This severely limits the options the team has for automated build machines and for building and deploying the project to QA, performance test, and production environments.

Maven helps address these issues. Maven is a project management framework that provides IDE-independent build and dependency management tools.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Describe Maven
• Explain the project object model (POM)
• Explain how Maven uses dependency management
• Outline the Maven lifecycle

WHAT IS MAVEN?

Maven bills itself as a project management framework. It strives to manage a project's build, reporting, and documentation from one place.

Maven's build management is declarative rather than task oriented. It has a built-in lifecycle, so you simply declare what you ...