Wednesday, April 7, 2010

so you want to learn Maven ???

Maven is the current trend among Java community. No surprises, as maven is a full project life-cycle management tool. The beauty of maven is, it standardizes all the project related activities. Where the sources should go, where the test resources should reside, etc. 
Once you learn how to use it, you will be able to work with any Java project that uses maven. The core part of maven only deals with parsing & manipulating XML s. The core of the maven is a platform which provides services to the plugins. The plugins takes care of the specific tasks. As an example the compiler plugin knows that it has to compile the sources under src/main/Java.
I myself did not pay much attention to maven at the beginning. I used to find a way around by referring to some one else's pom.xml . But then I understood that i cant get away with this tool.
So I  learnt it. Here are some valuable resources to learn maven. 

The site has a wealth of resources for learning maven. It is easy to get lost in the site though. The quick start guides are really good.The place is the premier place to learn about different maven plugins.
  • The Maven by Example : book  

There is a book by Oreilly called Maven definitive guide. May be this book is bit outdated as well. The guys at Sonatype has divided this book in to two parts. The "Maven by Example" is a great place to learn maven(my personnel recommendation :)  ) It covers the basic design of maven platform & it is more example oriented. so you better start with that .....

  • The maven complete Reference: book

If you are planning to go deep in to the maven world, this is the book. 





happy coding!!!!

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