A maven introduction.

So recently, I have been working on an opensource project and stumble upon maven. So I'm all ant guy (with ant background), and guess that to use maven should not be that difficult to start using it.

When you see a file in the java project, pom.xml, this should tell you that it is a maven configuration file. So for instance, in a as simple java project, it would look like

+-------------+
|project home |
+--+----------+
   |      
   |      +-------+
   +------+  src  |
   |      +---+---+
   |          |     +------+
   |          +-----+ main |
   |          |     +--+---+
   |          |        |    +----------+
   |          |        +----+   java   |
   |          |        |    +----------+
   |          |        |    +----------+
   |          |        +----+ resources|
   |          |             +----------+
   |          |     +------+
   |          +-----+ test |
   |                +--+---+
   |                   |    +----------+
   |                   +----+   java   |
   |                   |    +----------+
   |                   |    +----------+
   |                   +----+ resources|
   |     +--------+         +----------+
   +-----+ target |
   |     +--------+
   |     +--------+
   +-----+ pom.xml|
         +--------+

The most basic command that you ever gonna use and use it very often would probably

mvn package

With above command, mvn will compile your class, run any tests and package the deliverable code and resources into target/my-app-1.0.jar . If mvn produced this jar, this should be enough and that the developer should be able to concentrate the java project.

But if you are adventurous and want to know more about maven, continue to read on. There are a few maven phases which you can issue the command. The following is the standard maven lifecycle with an ordered phases.

• process-resources


• compile


• process-test-resources


• test-compile


• test


• package


• install


• deploy

So in order to satisfy the library dependencies of your project, you should specify coordinate of the lib that it depends into pom.xml. You can use  this site to search for the libraries it depends.

I hope this answer a simple start up to use maven to assist in your java project. If you reach here and have further question, this link  and this link .