Open Source
Maven
Apache Maven is a build and dependency management system that provides a rich set of features for quickly creating and automating projects in a team environment. Emphasizing convention over configuration, Maven reduces or eliminates much of the difficulties commonly associated with large development projects such as centralized management of library dependencies and standardization of build and test scripts. While Maven offers default configurations for many project types, it can be easily customized and extended using one of the many available plugins. However, the majority of teams will leverage Maven's sensible conventions to quickly configure a new project with complete support for today's agile methodologies including support for continuous builds and automated testing. Maven also integrates with version control systems and bug tracking software such as JIRA. Maven can even be used to generate project files for the leading integrated development environments such as Eclipse and IntelliJ.
Although the initial migration to Maven can present organizational challenges, the resulting uniformity across projects quickly yields benefits in developer productivity and ease of deployment. In addition, new team members will be able to hit the ground running rather than analyzing non-standard Ant scripts and configuring local development environments. Maven also enables centralized management of dependencies on both internal and external libraries. This allows IT executives and administrators to effectively manage an ever-growing portfolio of software, licenses and security patches.
