I read a lot of Maven documentation and at the end the most interesting question “How do I run an application with its dependencies?” wasn’t answered. Instead I was flooded with many xml configuration sections without showing a simple and complete configuration file. That’s why I wrote this howto but first a little story.
I came across Ivy and Maven a couple of days ago, both of which make it very easy to add a list of libraries to your Java project and add them to the classpath.
Basically both look for a project configuration file including your dependency list and they download the libraries from the internet and install them in the local repository ~/.ivy2 for Ivy and ~/.m2/repository for Maven which are then shared with your Ivy/Maven projects.
While Ivy is only a dependency manager which is integrated with the most popular build management system for Java projects (Ant), Maven is more than just such a manager. With Maven you have a build system and a dependency manager in one tool.
I focused on Maven and it took me a while to find out that a feature I was looking for wasn’t there natively. I assumed it would have a similar behaviour than Ivy but it hasn’t and works completely different.
I was missing a clear Maven howto which shows in 5 minutes how your project is created, compiled, packaged and especially how your standard java application is run afterwards.
I assume that Maven is already installed and that you are familiar with using a shell as I won’t use m2eclipse, the Maven integration for Eclipse. Maybe I’ll update this post later and give you a little introduction but for now let’s concentrate on using it in a shell.
I don’t guarantee that everything is 100% correct because I don’t use Maven that long. Post a comment if something is wrong.
