Better Builds with Maven 2.0

Better Builds with Maven 2.0

Preface

Welcome to Better Builds with Maven, an indispensable guide to understand and use Maven 2.0.

Maven 2 is a product that offers immediate value to many users and organizations. As you will soon

find, it does not take long to realize these benefits. Perhaps, reading this book will take you longer.

Maven works equally well for small and large projects, but Maven shines in helping teams operate

more effectively by allowing team members to focus on what the stakeholders of a project require --

leaving the build infrastructure to Maven!

This guide is not meant to be an in-depth and comprehensive resource but rather an introduction,

which provides a wide range of topics from understanding Maven's build platform to programming

nuances.

This guide is intended for Java developers who wish to implement the project management and

comprehension capabilities of Maven 2 and use it to make their day-to-day work easier and to get

help with the comprehension of any Java-based project. We hope that this book will be useful for Java

project managers as well.

For first time users, it is recommended that you step through the material in a sequential fashion. For

users more familiar with Maven (including Maven 1.x), this guide is written to provide a quick solution

for the need at hand.

Organization

The first two chapters of the book are geared toward a new user of Maven 2, they discuss what Maven

is and get you started with your first Maven project. Chapter 3 builds on that and shows you how to

build a real-world project. Chapter 4 shows you how to build and deploy a J2EE application. Chapter 5

focuses on developing plugins for Maven. Chapter 6 discusses project monitoring issues and

reporting, Chapter 7 discusses using Maven in a team development environment, and Chapter 8

shows you how to migrate Ant builds to Maven.

Chapter 1, Introducing Maven, goes through the background and philosophy behind Maven and

defines what Maven is.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with Maven, gives detailed instructions on creating, compiling and

packaging your first project. After reading this second chapter, you should be up and running with

Maven.

Chapter 3, Creating Applications with Maven, illustrates Maven's best practices and advanced

uses by working on a real-world example application. In this chapter you will learn to set up the

directory structure for a typical application and the basics of managing an application's development

with Maven.

Chapter 4, Building J2EE Applications, shows how to create the build for a full-fledged J2EE

application, how to use Maven to build J2EE archives (JAR, WAR, EAR, EJB, Web Services), and

how to use Maven to deploy J2EE archives to a container. At this stage you'll pretty much become an

expert Maven user.

Chapter 5, Developing Custom Maven Plugins, focuses on the task of writing custom plugins. It

starts by describing fundamentals, including a review of plugin terminology and the basic mechanics

of the Maven plugin framework. From there, the chapter covers the tools available to simplify the life of

the plugin developer. Finally, it discusses the various ways that a plugin can interact with the Maven

build environment and explores some examples.

Chapter 6, Assessing Project Health with Maven, discusses Maven's monitoring tools, reporting

tools, and how to use Maven to generate a Web site for your project. In this chapter, you will be

revisiting the Proficio application that was developed in Chapter 3, and learning more about the health

of the project.

Chapter 7, Team Collaboration with Maven, looks at Maven as a set of practices and tools that

enable effective team communication and collaboration. These tools aid the team to organize,

visualize, and document for reuse the artifacts that result from a software project. You will learn how to

use Maven to ensure successful team development.

Chapter 8, Migrating to Maven, explains a migration path from an existing build in Ant to Maven.

After reading this chapter, you will be able to take an existing Ant-based build, split it into modular

components if needed, compile and test the code, create JARs, and install those JARs in your local

repository using Maven. At the same time, you will be able to keep your current build working.

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