What is Maven?

Managing multiple projects is a difficult task when you want to maintain the consistency of the build process across your projects. Let's talk about how can use maven to solve these problems.

What is Maven?

As we know, Maven is a project management tool that is used by lots of developers to complete a build life cycle because maven provides a framework which we can automatically provide plug and play stuff for maintaining our build process across our projects.


What are the different features of Maven?

Before getting into a background of how a maven works, We should have a basic idea about the features of maven. So maven provides something called as model-based development or the model-based builds. Maven can build the jars, wars or it can create metadata out of the project. If we want to build a python project, we can have the Python plugins and create some python packages. If we are using a java project we can create jars or wars depending on what type of project we do. That is one of the features of Maven.

Another part is release management where we can create a release and then upload that into a distributed system or maven repository or any other repository where people can take it from. Maven can do that, so it can do the release management and the release distribution and the publication part as well. Along with that, it can maintain the dependencies, so as a single point of control, Maven can control the dependencies of our project.
We don't have to package the jars or the dependent wars of the jars into our project. Those will be used at the build time, so our repository or the codebase size will be reduced compared to storing everything into our project. So maven can help in downloading these dependencies and managing those dependencies at the build time.

Maven also provides something called plugin development where we can create multiple plugins and plug those plug tools into the project and use them based on the tasks whenever you need it. So for example, if we want to push some package on to our host, we can do it as a part of our plug-in itself. There could be a task, for example, our post-build process, after the way it is executed after package is completed we can create plugins to create the task after the plugin or the package is completed for the particular project.
So we can trigger the plugin after the package got created and then we can push that onto the remote machine or something like that. With the plugins we  can create whatever we want. There are lots plugins. Basically we should know there are multiple plugins and we can create any number of plugins and the we can plug and play inside the maven project.