Using Maven for project management

In the projects that we have created thus far in this chapter, we have managed many project management tasks, such as downloading libraries on which our project depends, adding them to the appropriate folder so that the web application can find it, and exporting the project to create the WAR file for deployment. These are just some of the project management tasks that we have performed so far, but there are many more, which we will see in the subsequent chapters. It helps to have a tool do many of the project management tasks for us so that we can focus on application development. There are some well-known build management tools available for Java, for example, Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org/) and Maven (http://maven.apache.org/).

In this section, we will see how to use Maven as a project management tool. By following the convention for creating the project structure and allowing projects to define the hierarchy, Maven makes project management easier...