Question

I have a shared dependency as follows –

    <groupId>common.spring</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
    <version>3.0</version>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

I then reference this dependency using :

<dependency>
            <groupId>common.spring</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
            <version>3.0</version>
            <type>pom</type>
     </dependency>

I’m using spring version 3.0, is it common practice to set the to same. So this will work as long as the tags match. But should I use the version of spring I am using in the tag, what is common convention ?

Answer 1

Common convention is to have a root pom, defining the version, and then leaving the version information out in your project poms so they will pick up the one from root pom.

Often, Spring is a kind of special case as it has multiple modules that you’d want to have the same version, so something like

  <properties>
    <spring.version>3.0.0</spring.version>
  </properties>

and

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
    <version>${spring.version}</version>
  </dependency>

in the root pom is what we use. In the project pom it would be then like this:

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
  </dependency>

---

However, if Spring is regarded just as a regular module, it would be just

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0</version>
  </dependency>

in the dependencies section in the root pom, and

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring</artifactId>
  </dependency>

on project pom.