You don't need to spend countless hours going through a massive ANT build file to figure out how exactly is your artifact is created.īecause of these useful qualities, the Java ecosystem adopted Maven generously. In a Maven project, you know where your source code is, where your test code is and where your resources are. The biggest advantage of using Maven is the following convention, which makes software development easy. Maven is not just a dependency management tool it's, in fact, much more than that. Maven took away all those pain by not only automatically downloading those JAR files for you but also created a central place, known as a Maven repository, to store those JAR files for better management. This is just a tiny example that shows how manually managing dependencies can create nightmares.

This can happen because of version mismatch, like Spring needed a higher version of log4j than available in your project. For example, you added a new library in your project - say the Spring Framework, which also needs log4j, but you thought log4j is already there, so you didn't do anything, only to realize that your application is not starting anymore and throwing long and convoluted errors. It may seem easy to you that just download the JAR file, but it's not so easy in practice.

I can vouch for Maven's usefulness because I have come from the pre-Maven world of Software development, where you need to manage all the JAR files required by your project. It allows you to build your project, manage dependencies, generate documentation, and a lot more. Apache Maven, or more commonly known as just 'Maven,' is an important tool for Java programmers.

Free course on apache ant