MAVEN
What is Maven?
Maven is a popular open-source build tool developed by the Apache Group to build, publish, and deploy several projects at once for better project management. The tool provides allows developers to build and document the lifecycle framework.
Maven is written in Java and is used to build projects written in C#, Scala, Ruby, etc. Based on the Project Object Model (POM), this tool has made the lives of Java developers easier while developing reports, checks build and testing automation setups.
Maven focuses on the simplification and standardization of the building process, taking care of the following:
- Builds
- Documentation
- Dependencies
- Reports
- SCMs
- Distribution
- Releases
- Mailing list
What is Maven: Evolution
Maven was created to simplify Jakarta Tribune project building processes. Many of the projects had slightly different ANT files, so Apache developed Maven to handle building multiple projects together, including publishing project information, facilitating team collaboration, deploying projects, and sharing JARS among several projects.
What is Maven: Objective
Maven’s purpose is to provide developers with:
- A comprehensive, maintainable, reusable, and simple model for projects.
- A set of tools and plug-ins that can interact with the declarative model.
What is Maven: Features
Maven is loaded with many valuable and useful features, which goes a long way towards explaining its popularity. Here are some of Maven’s more noteworthy features:
- A huge, continuously growing repository of user libraries
- The ability to set up projects easily, using best practices
- Dependency management, featuring automatic updating
- Backwards compatible with previous versions
- Strong error and integrity reporting
- Automatic parent versioning
- Ensures consistent usage across all projects
- It’s extensible, and you can easily write plug-ins using scripting languages or Java.
Build Tools
Build tools are the tools or programs that help create an executable application from the source code. As the name suggests, it’s essential for building or scripting a wide variety of tasks.
The build tool is needed for the following processes:
- Generating source code
- Generating documentation from the source code
- Compiling source code
- Packaging the compiled codes into JAR files
- Installing the packaged code in the local repository, server, or central repository
Project Object Model (POM)
Maven is so useful thanks to the Project Object Model (POM), which is an XML file that has all the information regarding project and configuration details. The POM has the description of the project, details regarding the versioning, and configuration management of the project.
The XML file is located in the project home directory. When you execute a task, Maven searches for the POM in the current directory.
The Need for Maven
Maven is chiefly used for Java-based projects, helping to download dependencies, which refers to the libraries or JAR files. The tool helps get the right JAR files for each project as there may be different versions of separate packages.
After Maven, downloading dependencies doesn’t require visiting the official websites of different software. You can visit mvnrepository to find libraries in different languages. The tool also helps to create the right project structure in struts, servlets, etc., which is essential for execution.
Advantages of Maven
- Helps manage all the processes, such as building, documentation, releasing, and distribution in project management
- Simplifies the process of project building
- Increases the performance of the project and the building process
- The task of downloading Jar files and other dependencies is done automatically
- Provides easy access to all the required information
- Makes it easy for the developer to build a project in different environments without worrying about the dependencies, processes, etc.
- In Maven, it’s easy to add new dependencies by writing the dependency code in the pom file
Conversely, Maven has a few drawbacks.
- Maven requires installation in the working system and the Maven plug-in for the IDE
- If the Maven code for an existing dependency is unavailable, you cannot add that dependency using Maven itself
- Some sources claim that Maven is slow.