Notes

What is maven the developers call it a

build automation tool but it is much

more than that it is a project

management tool. Building a project means

compiling the source code running the

tests which could be unit tests as well

as integration tests packaging the

compiled code into jar files bundling

these jar files into a web archive or a

war file deploying these wars on to the

servers and several other tasks all

these tasks can be automated using tools

such as maven and etc if you have worked

with tools like ant apache ant then you

know that we have to come up with a lot

of XML configuration to perform these

tasks or to automate these tasks for our

application whereas maven uses

convention over configuration that is if

we follow a certain project structure

when we create our projects such as here

is the base project directory under it

source main Java source folder has a

child folder called main under it we

have Java this is where all our source

code should go source main SRC main

resources is where any resources such as

property files or XML configuration that

we use in our Java classes should go

SRC test Java is where all our unit

and integration tests should be placed

and finally SRC test resources is

where all the property files or XML

configuration that we use on our tests

should be placed once we use this folder

structure we can simply execute a maven

command such as maven install and maven

will compile the source code under the

SRC main Java run the unit tests under

SRC test Java and if the tests pass it

will bundle or package the compiled

classes into a jar file if it is a

standalone java application if it is a

web application it will bundle it into a

war file and it can also deploy

the war file onto a web application.

This folder structure will be slightly

different for a standalone Java project

for a web application and for different

types of projects but the beauty is that

we need not create these folders

manually for each type of project maven

provides several archetypes think about

these archetypes as templates we can

execute a command with an archetype and

it will create the folder structure the

standard folder structure required by

maven for us there are different types

of archetypes like standalone, webapp, EAR

etc another additional advantage is that

all the popular ides such as Eclipse

IntelliJ come with inbuilt support for

these archetypes we can create the

project's the different types of maven

projects from within an IDE and also

run and execute our build from within

eclipse from within intelliJ.