What is Maven?
Maven is essentially a project management and comprehension tool. Maven provides a way to help with managing build life cycle of project. It helps to the developers to automate the project’s build infrastructure in almost no time as Maven uses a standard directory layout and a default build life cycle.
The most powerful feature is able to download the project dependency libraries automatically. Other features are also powerful like creating reports, checks, build and testing automation setups.
Apache Maven helps to manage
- Builds
- Documentation
- Reporting
- Dependencies
- SCMs
- Releases
- Distribution
What is a Build Tool?
A build tool is a tool that takes care of everything for building a process and automates everything related to building the project. It working on following tasks.
- Generating source code (if auto-generated code is used in software project).
- Generating documentation from the source code of project.
- Compiling source code.
- Packaging compiled code into JAR files or ZIP files or WAR files.
- Installing the packaged code in local repository, server repository, or central repository or some else.
Except from above listed tasks for any given project may have more other tasks these needed to build the finished software. In the case such tasks we can also plugged into a build tool, so these tasks can be automated too.
If we are using any build tool MAVEN, ANT, GRADLE then we definitely have many advantages over manual processing like it minimizes the risk of humans making errors while building the software manually and typically faster process of build than a human doing the same process manually.
