First,for understand and to be able to exploit maven, you must know that a projet with maven , is a project which contains necessary a xml file in the root with the name pom.xml (project object model) .
The POM.xml
The pom.xml (project object model) is the fendamental unit for work in the maven environement . its a xml file which contains the information about the project and configuration details exploited by maven to build the project.
The pom was renamed from project.xml in maven 1 to pom.xml in maven version 2.* .before the all goals are defined in maven.xml , now all goals and plugins are defined in the pom.xml , so maven search this file in the current directory of the project and lanch the actions/ goals performed in it
the pom have an other configuration is the dependency , so maven can download and attach all dependencies in the project such a jar for the good execution and for compilation .
The minimum requirement for a pom is :
- Project Root
- Model Version
- groupId
- artifactId
- version
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
<artifactId>my-app</artifactId>
<version>1</version>
</project>
In the next chapters , we will see how manage the dependencies , and how we can compile and package and do other things with this unique tool