Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Adding a Dependency

You have a project with a single class which you've successfully compiled and executed. Next, you'll add a dependency to the project descriptor and start to use Maven to manage project dependencies. For the purposes of this lab, assume that you need to work with the Spring Framework. Add a dependency on two artifacts from the Spring Framework—spring-core-1.1.4.jar and spring-web-1.1.4.jar.

How do I do that?

First, you need to locate the JAR you need in Maven's default central repository, served from ibiblio.org at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/. Load this URL in a web browser and you will see a series of directories; the directory we are interested in is springframework, and the structure of the subdirectories under springframework follows:

http://www.ibiblio.org/maven
    /springframework
        /jars
            spring-core-1.1.4.jar
            spring-dao-1.1.4.jar
            spring-web-1.1.4.jar

To depend on an artifact, you use three elements within dependency—groupId, artifactId, and version. You can add dependencies to both artifacts by replacing the dependencies element in test-application/project.xml with the following XML:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>springframework</groupId>
               <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.4</version>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>springframework</groupId>
               <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.4</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Now, run the jar goal and take a look at the output of Maven; it should contain something that looks like ...