Imagine an interview question about MAVEN …

… or about how would you proceed to create a maven plugin.

What if you would be in a position to talk 5 minute about all you know about maven? What would you say?

I would say that maven is a tool to manage your software builds, and in maven all work goes through plugin and goals. Afterwards I would continue to define the plugin (is a collection of goals) and goal (performs the action in maven builds) terms. Plugins and goals can be called independently, or as part of a lifecycle phase (is a sequence of name phase). Forward I will point that executing a phase, executes all previously phases.

Maven manages all dependencies you need within a pom.xml file. This file is also used to version your software.

Maven has 3 (three) default lifecycles:

• clean;
• default (has 23 phases);
• site.

Default lifecycle – phases

Maven has various phases comprises in the default lifecycle. The most important of them are:

• compile – this phase will compile the source code of the project.
• test-compile – will compile the test source code presented into the test destination directory.
• test – run the tests.
• package – takes the compiled code and packages it into a distributed format such a jar or a war.
• install – install the package into the local repository for use as a dependency in other projects locally.
• deploy

Plugin and goals

If it would to do a terminology analogy with java programming language, I would say that goals are similar with methods, and plugins are similar with classes.

Mavem commands

To run maven commands, you need maven to your classpath,

Other maven commands:

Create a maven custom plugin

To create a custom maven plugin, you use the archetype plugin and call the create goal.

Advantages of using maven

• simple project setup with guidelines for best practices
• consistent usage across all projects
• dependency management within a centra repository of JARs
• extensible plugins which can be written in Java or scripting languages