Apache Maven
Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.
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:
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:
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:
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.
Features:
The following are the key features of Maven in a nutshell:
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
- Providing a uniform build system
- Providing quality project information
- Providing guidelines for best practices development
- Allowing transparent migration to new features
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
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 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.
Features:
The following are the key features of Maven in a nutshell:
- Simple project setup that follows best practices - get a new project or module started in seconds
- Consistent usage across all projects means no ramp up time for new developers coming onto a project
- Superior dependency management including automatic updating, dependency closures (also known as transitive dependencies)
- Able to easily work with multiple projects at the same time
- A large and growing repository of libraries and metadata to use out of the box, and arrangements in place with the largest Open Source projects for real-time availability of their latest releases
- Extensible, with the ability to easily write plugins in Java or scripting languages
- Instant access to new features with little or no extra configuration
- Ant tasks for dependency management and deployment outside of Maven
- Model based builds: Maven is able to build any number of projects into predefined output types such as a JAR, WAR, or distribution based on metadata about the project, without the need to do any scripting in most cases.
- Coherent site of project information: Using the same metadata as for the build process, Maven is able to generate a web site or PDF including any documentation you care to add, and adds to that standard reports about the state of development of the project. Examples of this information can be seen at the bottom of the left-hand navigation of this site under the "Project Information" and "Project Reports" submenus.
- Release management and distribution publication: Without much additional configuration, Maven will integrate with your source control system such as CVS and manage the release of a project based on a certain tag. It can also publish this to a distribution location for use by other projects. Maven is able to publish individual outputs such as a JAR, an archive including other dependencies and documentation, or as a source distribution.
- Dependency management: Maven encourages the use of a central repository of JARs and other dependencies. Maven comes with a mechanism that your project's clients can use to download any JARs required for building your project from a central JAR repository much like Perl's CPAN. This allows users of Maven to reuse JARs across projects and encourages communication between projects to ensure that backward compatibility issues are dealt with. We are collaborating with the folks at Ibiblio who have graciously allowed the central repository to live on their servers.
