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Is it true that one of the real benefits of Maven is that its projects structure is clearly defined and therefore it can be opened in any IDE that supports Maven?

We develop in a team consisting of 5 people and we use three different IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse, Netbeans). I know that I cannot open an Ant project of Eclipse in Netbeans but with Maven this is possible.

Is this really reason enough to use Maven?

Willi Mentzel
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1 Answers1

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Maven and Ant are two different things.

Ant is a build tool while Maven accumulates the functionality of:

  • resolving dependencies (you only specify the dependencies, and Maven cares about downloading them in the correct version from the default repositories on the i-net, or the ones you specified explicitly)
  • a build tool (incorporating Ant),
  • creating distribution artifacts (containing not only the jar/war/etc. file of the project but also dependencies, resources, documentation),
  • runtime environment (e.g. starting Jetty and deploying your artifact)
  • unit testing
  • integration testing
  • deployment (including signing, incrementing the version, deploying the artifacts etc.)
  • and more (look out for plugins on i-net)

Maven uses lifecycles to achieve this. You can trigger certain functionality at certain points in the lifecycle. For example unit tests should be run right after compiling while integration tests (e.g. selenium tests) require more setup, maybe initializing a web server and deploying the WAR file.

Risadinha
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