Welcome to Apache Maven

Maven is a highly configurable framework that you can use to manage various aspects of a project's life cycle, from building and deploying an application to document generation and project management. Maven, like Ant, is a very popular development tool due to its standardized project layout and dependency management mechanism. By following standard conventions for project layout and using common defaults for building lifecycle phases such as compilation and packaging, you can create projects that are easy to understand and manage. Maven uses Project Object Model (POM) to describe project-related information. Unlike Ant, in which you need to define how projects are built and deployed, all Maven projects implicitly share a set of plugins for doing well-defined tasks such as building and packaging. These plugins can also be configured to change default behavior and change build order as needed.

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
• Providing a uniform build system
• Providing quality project information
• Providing guidelines for best practices development
• Allowing transparent migration to new features