Mavan Introduction

*** What is Maven? ***

 Maven is a popular open-source build tool developed by the Apache Group to build, publish, and deploy several projects at once for better project management. 
The tool provides allows developers to build and document the lifecycle framework.

** Maven is a powerful project management tool that is based on POM (project object model). It is used for projects build, dependency and documentation.


*** What Maven does? ***

Maven simplifies the above mentioned problems. It does mainly following tasks.

- It makes a project easy to build
- It provides uniform build process (maven project can be shared by all the maven projects)
- It provides project information (log document, cross referenced sources, mailing list, dependency list, unit test reports etc.)
- It is easy to migrate for new features of Maven

*** Apache Maven helps to manage

- Builds
- Documentation
- Reporing
- SCMs
- Releases
- Distribution


*** What is Build Tool
A build tool takes care of everything for building a process. It does following:

- Generates source code (if auto-generated code is used)
- Generates documentation from source code
- Compiles source code
- Packages compiled code into JAR of ZIP file
- Installs the packaged code in local repository, server repository, or central repository