apache maven

Introduction

Maven, a Yiddish word meaning accumulator of knowledge, was originally started as an attempt to simplify the build processes in the Jakarta Turbine project. There were several projects each with their own Ant build files that were all slightly different and JARs were checked into CVS. They wanted a standard way to build the projects, a clear definition of what the project consisted of, an easy way to publish project information and a way to share JARs across several projects.

The result is a tool that can now be used for building and managing any Java-based project. We hope that we have created something that will make the day-to-day work of Java developers easier and generally help with the comprehension of any Java-based project.

WHAT IS MAVEN?

Maven is a project management and comprehension tool. Maven provides developers a complete build lifecycle framework. Development team can automate the project’s build infrastructure in almost no time as Maven uses a standard directory layout and a default build lifecycle.

In case of multiple development teams environment, Maven can set-up the way to work as per standards in a very short time. As most of the project setups are simple and reusable, Maven makes life of developer easy while creating reports, checks, build and testing automation setups.

Maven provides developers ways to manage following:

1. Builds
2. Documentation
3. Reporting
4. Dependencies
5. SCMs
6. Releases
7. Distribution
8. mailing list

To summarize, Maven simplifies and standardizes the project build process. It handles compilation, distribution, documentation, team collaboration and other tasks seamlessly. Maven increases reusability and takes care of most of build related tasks.

MAVEN HISTORY

Maven was originally designed to simplify building processes in Jakarta Turbine project. There were several projects and each project contained slightly different ANT build files. JARs were checked into CVS.

Apache group then developed Maven which can build multiple projects together, publish projects information, deploy projects, share JARs across several projects and help in collaboration of teams.

MAVEN’S OBJECTIVES

Maven’s primary goal is to allow a developer to comprehend the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time. In order to attain this goal there are several areas of concern that Maven attempts to deal with:

• Making the build process easy

 While using Maven doesn’t eliminate the need to know about the underlying mechanisms, Maven does provide a lot of shielding from the details

• Providing a uniform build system

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

• Providing quality project information

                  

Maven provides plenty of useful project information that is in part taken from your POM and in part generated from your project’s sources. For example, Maven can provide:

• Change log document created directly from source control
• Cross referenced sources
• Mailing lists
• Dependency list
• Unit test reports including coverage

As Maven improves the information set provided will improve, all of which will be transparent to users of Maven.

Other products can also provide Maven plugins to allow their set of project information alongside some of the standard information given by Maven, all still based on the POM.

• Providing guidelines for best practices development

Maven aims to gather current principles for best practices development, and make it easy to guide a project in that direction.

For example, specification, execution, and reporting of unit tests are part of the normal build cycle using Maven. Current unit testing best practices were used as guidelines:

• Keeping your test source code in a separate, but parallel source tree
• Using test case naming conventions to locate and execute tests
• Have test cases setup their environment and don’t rely on customizing the build for test preparation.

Maven also aims to assist in project workflow such as release management and issue tracking.

Maven also suggests some guidelines on how to layout your project’s directory structure so that once you learn the layout you can easily navigate any other project that uses Maven and the same defaults.

• Allowing transparent migration to new features

Maven provides an easy way for Maven clients to update their installations so that they can take advantage of any changes that been made to Maven itself.

Installation of new or updated plugins from third parties or Maven itself has been made trivial for this reason.

Source: https://maven.apache.org

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