Apache Maven

Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), It can manage a project's build, reporting, and documentation from a central piece of information. Maven is a part of the Apache Software Foundation.

Maven, a Yiddish word meaning accumulator of knowledge, began as an attempt to simplify the build processes in the Jakarta Turbine project. There were several projects, each with their Ant build files, that were all slightly different. JARs were checked into CVS. An easy way to publish project information and a way to share JARs across several projects.

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 the app 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

It 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, It can provide:

• Change log document created directly from source control
• Cross-referenced sources
• List of mailing lists managed by the project
• Dependency list
• Unit test reports including coverage

Features and Highlights

• 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 the app
• 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, Apache 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, It will integrate with your source control system (such as Subversion or Git) 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. The app is able to publish individual outputs such as a JAR, an archive including other dependencies and documentation, or as a source distribution.
• Dependency management: It encourages the use of a central repository of JARs and other dependencies. It 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.

Note: Requires Java Development Kit.