How This Book Is Organized

This book is a hybrid of styles. It is both a linear progression of ideas which will accelerate your introduction to Maven, and a collection of independent chapters and labs to be used as a reference. If you are already familiar with Maven, you may want to skim Chapters 1 and 2 before reading the rest of this book, as Chapters 1 and 2 introduce Maven 1 in the context of the upcoming Maven 2 release. If you are new to Maven, read the first chapter, before you move on to the more-advanced Maven topics in Chapters 3 through 6.

The content of this book is organized into chapters which consist of a series of labs or exercises. Within a chapter, each exercise builds upon the previous exercises. The book contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1

Gets you up and running with Maven in less than an hour. If you are new to Maven, read this chapter first, as it lays the foundation for the following chapters.

Chapter 2

While Maven provides default behavior sufficient for almost any project, there will be a situation that calls for customization of the build process. This chapter demonstrates the creation of custom goals, preGoals and postGoals, and the use of Jelly script and properties files to customize the behavior of Maven.

Chapter 3

This series of labs will teach you how to break a complex project into a series of smaller, related subprojects. Maven can be used to manage the dependencies between a set of projects, and you will see how Maven can be used to separate a web application into multiple projects.

Chapter 4

Maven plug-ins provide a series of reports which provide a useful set of metrics for any project. This chapter demonstrates the use of reports to report on code quality, unit tests, code duplication, and project activity. This chapter also demonstrates how you can use Maven to publish and deploy project artifacts.

Chapter 5

Introduces a process for sharing a Maven installation and creating a custom remote repository for your team. The bulk of this chapter shows you how to use Maven to set up a continuous integration environment using CruiseControl.

Chapter 6

Shows you how to build both simple and complex Maven plug-ins. A simple JAR execution plug-in is developed, and a plug-in involving Aspect-oriented programming is introduced.

Appendix A

Lists all of the Maven plug-ins used in this book, and it provides instructions for installing plug-ins not bundled with Maven 1.0.2.