TheNEXUS

In Chapter 7, Multi-Module Enterprise Project, we showed how many pieces of Maven come together to produce a fully functional multimodule build. Although the example from that chapter suggests a real application—one that interacts with a database, a web service, and that itself presents two interfaces: one in a web application, and one on the command line—that example project is still contrived. To present the complexity of a real project would require a book far larger than the one you are now reading. Real-life applications evolve over years and are often maintained by large, diverse groups of developers, each with a different focus. In a real-world project, you are often evaluating decisions and designs made and created by others. In this chapter, we take a step back from the examples you’ve seen in the previous chapters, and we ask ourselves if there are any optimizations that might make more sense given what we now know about Maven. Maven is a very capable tool that can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. Because of this, there are often a million ways to accomplish the same task, and there is often no one “right” way to configure your Maven project.

Don’t misinterpret that last sentence as a license to go off and ask Maven to do something it wasn’t designed for. While Maven allows for a diversity of approach, there is certainly “A Maven Way”, and you’ll be more productive using Maven as it was designed to be used. All this chapter is trying to do is communicate some of the optimizations you can perform on an existing Maven project. Why didn’t we just introduce an optimized POM in the first place? Designing POMs for pedagogy is a very different requirement from designing POMs for efficiency. While it is certainly much easier to define a certain setting in your ~/.m2/settings.xml than to declare a profile in a pom.xml, writing a book, and reading a book is mostly about pacing and making sure we’re not introducing concepts before you are ready. In the previous chapters, we’ve made an effort not to overwhelm the reader with too much information, and, in doing so, we’ve skipped some core concepts like the dependencyManagement element introduced in this chapter.

There are many instances in the previous chapters when the authors of this book took a shortcut or glossed over an important detail to shuffle you along to the main point of a specific chapter. You learned how to create a Maven project, and you compiled and installed it without having to wade through hundreds of pages introducing every last switch and dial available to you. We’ve done this because we believe it is important to deliver the new Maven user to a result faster rather than meandering our way through a very long, seemingly interminable story. Once you’ve started to use Maven, you should know how to analyze your own projects and POMs. In this chapter, we take a step back and look at what we are left with after the example from Chapter 7, Multi-Module Enterprise Project.