Maven in Action

Maven in Action is the first technical monograph in China to systematically introduce Apache Maven. Its author, Xu Xiaobin (Juven Xu), is an active promoter of the Chinese Maven community and has participated in Nexus development and maintenance of the Maven Central Repository. The book is written against Maven 3.0 and compares its features with those of Maven 2.x, making it easier for users still on older versions to understand the migration. The book is divided into three parts: basic operations, core concepts, and advanced applications. Chapters 1–4 cover Maven's value, installation and configuration, writing a POM, generating a project skeleton, and the "account registration service" background case that runs through the book. Chapters 5–8 go deep into coordinates and dependencies, dependency scope, transitive dependencies and dependency mediation, repository categories (local, remote, central, and private), mirrors and snapshots, the three lifecycles, plugin binding and resolution, aggregation and inheritance, the reactor, and other core mechanisms. Chapters 9–16 cover practical scenarios: setting up a private repository with Nexus, organizing tests and coverage reports with Surefire, continuous integration with Hudson, building and deploying web applications with Jetty and Cargo, version management and automated releases, flexible builds through profiles and resource filtering, project site generation, and using m2eclipse. Chapters 17–18 extend to writing Maven plugins and custom Archetypes. Most of the knowledge points come with hands-on examples, and the case from Chapter 4 is carried through later chapters, making the book suitable for Java developers from first use up to team-level engineering standards.