Question

According to What is Maven the objectives are:

• Making the build process easy
• Providing a uniform build system
• Providing quality project information
• Providing guidelines for best practices development
• Allowing transparent migration to new features

Can I just make a build script in bash instead?

What is the motivation of using a maven project? Is there any example?

Answer 1

Maven is a tool that handles a lot of the boilerplate project setup and configuration for you. For example, if you wanted a Java project to properly integrate with a build server, provide code coverage information, and produce a jar file that can easily used in other projects around your organization – you could spend weeks setting this up manually using ANT, or you could just ’embrace’ the Maven way of doing things.

In addition, you can setup archetypes (and many already exist) that are pre-configured projects for your desired setup. This can be a great way to enforce standards and increase productivity within an organization.

Maven does provide rules that are a bit rigid, but in the end it greatly cuts down on the time required to do many different tasks. I would recommend Maven: The Definitive Guide from O’Reilly as a resource to review.