Question

Must I define every single spring library one by one in my pom.xml , or is there somekind of multipack?

I found out that, for example, when I let maven download spring-core, it also downloaded spring-asm.

Are there more such packs or similar shortcuts….?

Answer 1

There is a possible duplicate here: Maven – include all submodules of a pom as dependencies in another module

The short answer is no. The long answer is even if you could it would not be a good idea.

Spring used to offer a bundle groupId=org.springframework artifactId=spring and groupId=org.springframework artifactId=spring-all. For various reasons (I can’t find the link) Spring decided this was a bad practice and I tend to agree.

The best thing to do is if your really want to include all the spring submodules is to use parent poms and a property to denote the version … eg:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.snaphop</groupId>
  <artifactId>snaphop-parent</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.53-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>snaphop-parent</name>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>
    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <java.version>1.6</java.version>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <spring.version>3.1.0.RELEASE</spring.version>
    </properties>

..skip some lines

<dependencyManagement>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>

You’ll have to read about parent poms here: http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-pom.html#Project_Inheritance_vs_Project_Aggregation (or just google).

The other option is to make your own dummy project with all spring dependencies and depend on that.

That being said I really recommend you explicitly choose your dependecies as it can really help modularize/decouple/refactor your project in the future.