Chapter 8. Optimizing and Refactoring POMs

Introduction

In Chapter 7, we showed how many pieces of Maven come together to produce a fully functional multimodule build. Although the example from that chapter suggests a real application—one that interacts with a database, a web service, and that itself presents two interfaces: one in a web application, and one on the command line—that example project is still contrived. To present the complexity of a real project would require a book far larger than the one you are now reading. Real-life applications evolve over years and are often maintained by large, diverse groups of developers, each with a different focus. In a real-world project, you are often evaluating decisions and designs made and created by others. In this chapter, we take a step back from the examples you’ve seen in Part II, and we ask ourselves if there are any optimizations that might make more sense given what we now know about Maven. Maven is a very capable tool that can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. Because of this, there are often a million ways to accomplish the same task, and there is often no one “right” way to configure your Maven project.

Don’t misinterpret that last sentence as a license to go off and ask Maven to do something it wasn’t designed for. Although Maven allows for a diversity of approach, there is certainly “A Maven Way,” and you’ll be more productive using Maven as it was designed to be used. All this chapter ...

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