Java software development is often associated with repetitive tasks like building project's java classes, generating documentation and reporting. Doing this repetitive tasks manually costs a lot of time and tend to be error-prone. In addition to that it is extremely boring to do the same tasks again and again. These tasks should get automated, because they are often equal. To automate these tasks a build tool that could do this work is needed. Today, many java projects are using the Maven as a build tool to manage these objectives. The Maven project reached big popularity by making repetitive tasks automatable.
Another advantage when using Maven is that all dependencies referenced by the project are resolved automatically. This is extremely helpful for bigger java projects that use a huge set of dependencies. To explain how to use Maven and to help you to get into it we start a new tutorial-series about Maven 2 at united-coders.com. The initial part of this tutorial describes how to set up a Maven 2 project structure. Further parts of this tutorial-series will describe the main functionality of Maven (e.g. plugins, archetypes, the dependency mechanism, profiles, repositories, scopes...) stepwise.
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