pom

Welcome back to the second part of our tutorial-series on Maven 2. This part will focus on the pom.xml and the Maven 2 dependency management, Maven properties and dependency scopes. To get started let's first set up a project similar to the project we used in the first part of this tutorial. Set up the project as described in the article Maven 2 (Part 1): Setting up a simple Apache Maven 2 Project and reopen the pom.xml.

Dependencies

Some dependencies often are needed to write your applications. Commonly we (developers, developers, developers,...) are using some open source libraries and frameworks (e.g. the spring application framework or apache commons-logging,...). Sometimes own libraries should be referenced by a java project. To solve this problem Maven delivers a very good dependency mechanism that manages the dependencies of your project transitivly.

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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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