What does Maven do in theory and in practice When is it worth to use it

Question

I am about to start a Java project just for practice. I've read about Maven, but I don't actually understand when it is meant to be used.

Can you give me some practical tips? Does Maven help a lot? What does Maven actually do for my project?

User · Answer

Maven is a build tool  Along with Ant or Gradle are Javas tools for building  If you are a newbie in Java though just build using your IDE since Maven has a steep learning curve

User · Answer

From the Sonatype doc      The answer to this question depends on your own perspective  The great   majority of Maven users are going to call Maven a    build tool     a tool   used to build deployable artifacts from source code  Build engineers   and project managers might refer to Maven as something more   comprehensive  a project management tool  What is the difference  A   build tool such as Ant is focused solely on preprocessing    compilation  packaging  testing  and distribution  A project   management tool such as Maven provides a superset of features found in   a build tool  In addition to providing build capabilities  Maven can   also run reports  generate a web site  and facilitate communication   among members of a working team    I d strongly recommend looking at the Sonatype doc and spending some time looking at the available plugins to understand the power of Maven    Very briefly  it operates at a higher conceptual level than  say  Ant  With Ant  you d specify the set of files and resources that you want to build  then specify how you want them jarred together  and specify the order that should occur in  clean compile jar   With Maven this is all implicit  Maven expects to find your files in particular places  and will work automatically with that  Consequently setting up a project with Maven can be a lot simpler  but you have to play by Maven s rules

User · Answer

What it does  Maven is a  build management tool   it is for defining how your  java files get compiled to  class  packaged into  jar  or  war or  ear  files   pre post processed with tools  managing your CLASSPATH  and all others sorts of tasks that are required to build your project  It is similar to Apache Ant or Gradle or Makefiles in C C    but it attempts to be completely self-contained in it that you shouldn t need any additional tools or scripts by incorporating other common tasks like downloading  amp  installing necessary libraries etc   It is also designed around the  build portability  theme  so that you don t get issues as having the same code with the same buildscript working on one computer but not on another one  this is a known issue  we have VMs of Windows 98 machines since we couldn t get some of our Delphi applications compiling anywhere else   Because of this  it is also the best way to work on a project between people who use different IDEs since IDE-generated Ant scripts are hard to import into other IDEs  but all IDEs nowadays understand and support Maven  IntelliJ  Eclipse  and NetBeans   Even if you don t end up liking Maven  it ends up being the point of reference for all other modern builds tools   Why you should use it  There are three things about Maven that are very nice    Maven will  after you declare which ones you are using  download all the libraries that you use and the libraries that they use for you automatically  This is very nice  and makes dealing with lots of libraries ridiculously easy  This lets you avoid  dependency hell   It is similar to Apache Ant s Ivy  It uses  Convention over Configuration  so that by default you don t need to define the tasks you want to do  You don t need to write a  compile    test    package   or  clean  step like you would have to do in Ant or a Makefile  Just put the files in the places in which Maven expects them and it should work off of the bat  Maven also has lots of nice plug-ins that you can install that will handle many routine tasks from generating Java classes from an XSD schema using JAXB to measuring test coverage with Cobertura  Just add them to your pom xml and they will integrate with everything else you want to do    The initial learning curve is steep  but  nearly  every professional Java developer uses Maven or wishes they did  You should use Maven on every project although don t be surprised if it takes you a while to get used to it and that sometimes you wish you could just do things manually  since learning something new sometimes hurts  However  once you truly get used to Maven you will find that build management takes almost no time at all   How to Start  The best place to start is  Maven in 5 Minutes   It will get you start with a project ready for you to code in with all the necessary files and folders set-up  yes  I recommend using the quickstart archetype  at least at first     After you get started you ll want a better understanding over how the tool is intended to be used  For that  Better Builds with Maven  is the most thorough place to understand the guts of how it works   however   Maven  The Complete Reference  is more up-to-date  Read the first one for understanding  but then use the second one for reference

[java] What does Maven do, in theory and in practice? When is it worth to use it?

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