When used judiciously, profiles can make it very easy to customize a
build for different platforms. If something in your build needs to
define a platform-specific path for something like an application
server, you can put these configuration points in a profile which is
activated by an operating system parameter. If you have a project
which needs to produce different artifacts for different environments,
you can customize the build behavior for different environments and
platforms via profile-specific plugin behavior. Using profiles, builds
can become portable, there is no need to rewrite your build logic to
support a new environment, just override the configuration that needs
to change and share the configuration points which can be shared.
