Maven Playground

What Is Maven?

Maven is a software project management tool. It can manage a project’s build, reporting, and documentation, in a simplified way using a central piece of information. Maven provides a standard way to manage projects that makes it easy for developers to understand project structure and build lifecycle. Although it can build software written in multiple languages, it is mostly used for Java projects.

Maven can provide the following features:

• Build lifecycle
• Documentation
• Reporting
• Dependency management
• Release and distribution

How Maven Works

The main tasks that Maven is responsible for are software build lifecycle and dependency management. 

To declare how these tasks should work, Maven uses what is called a POM file. POM is an XML file that contains the project information and defines its build configuration.

The build lifecycle defines the steps required to run on the project to generate a final artifact for the software. These steps can include compilation, unit testing, and packaging the compiled code into a distributable format. In order for Maven to execute these steps it uses some type of plugin for each specific step. And using this plugin it runs what is called a goal. This goal defines the step that Maven wants the plugin to do.

For example, Maven uses a “maven-compiler-plugin” to execute the “compile” goal. By using this goal the source code is compiled as part of the project lifecycle. 

To make it easier to manage projects, each set of goals are combined into what is called a lifecycle phase. These phases should be well defined inside the lifecycle and used as a standard method for building projects. When any phase is executed this means that all goals included in this phase are executed. You can still run individual goals outside of phases when needed.

Maven also makes dependency management easier in large projects. When writing software code, you don’t want to implement some functionality from scratch that might have been implemented before and can be reused directly in your project. When this functionality is a common part that might be reused multiple times in different projects, it is usually packaged in its own separate piece of code, and can be imported inside your application. This piece of code is what we call a dependency. When you write code, you'll usually want to use such dependencies, to avoid rewriting what is already available online. Managing these dependencies, how to download them, how to add them to your application, and which version you require, is called dependency management.

Maven uses repositories to store dependencies in a centralized location. You can then use these repositories to download any specific dependencies you need when you build your application through Maven commands. You declare the dependencies you require, the plugins and goals to be executed, and other project configuration, in the POM file (this is a centralized location from where Maven can read project information and configuration). When you run a Maven command that triggers the build of the application, then Maven will look for the POM file, read the configuration, and start downloading the dependencies and executing the required tasks.

Maven Playground details

In this Maven playground you’re provided with the following : 

1. Maven installed.
2. OpenJDK installed.
3. Sample Maven project with the name "mvn-workspace".

Start experimenting right away, without having to deal with time-consuming installation and configuration steps!