Maven is essentially a project management and comprehension tool and as such provides a way to help with managing:
- Builds
- Documentation
- Reporting
- Dependencies
- SCMs
- Releases
- Distribution
If you want to have more details about maven please refer The Philosophy of Maven and The History of Maven.
Advantages of using mavan:
- common build structure
- build best practices enforcement (shared build meme)
- automated build of application, from source code to pre-production platform => fast time to market with reduced risks
- works well with distributed teams ;-) Location doesn't matter.
Compared to Ant:
- Higher level of reusability between builds
- Faster turn around time to set up a powerful build (once you're used to Maven)
- Less maintenance
- Shared build meme. I know how to build any maven project
- Greater momentum: Ant is now legacy and not moving fast ahead. Maven is forging ahead fast and there's a potential of having lots of high-value tools around Maven (CI, Dashboard project, IDE integration, etc).
You can download the maven:
How to install:
create a environment variable on bash profile as
MAVEN_HOME=/installation path/apache-maven-2.2.1
Finally export it as export PATH=$MAVEN_HOME/bin:$PATH on your bash profile in Linux and source the bash profile .
You can check if maven is correctly installed by having mvn -v on terminal.
