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CS156

The short version:

  • Just as make and CMake are build tools for C/C++, there are a variety of build tools for Java.
  • The main build tools used with Java as of 2020 are ant, Maven and Gradle.
    • Ant is the oldest of these, and is beginning to fall out of favor, through you will still see some older tutorials using it.
    • Maven tends to be used more by those building full-stack web apps
    • Gradle tends to be used more when building Android applications

In this course, we’ll concentrate on Maven.

Similarity with npm, pip, gem

We can compare Maven to Makefiles in C++, but there is another comparison if you’ve worked with package managers in languages such as:

  • JavaScript (node/yarn),
  • Python (pip)
  • Ruby (gem/bundler):

Maven is not just a build manager, but also a package manager

By package management, I mean that instead of you having to manage the process of obtaining all the .jar files for third party library that your project may depend on (and the .jars that those files depend on, and so on…), maven manages that for you.

You add dependencies to the file pom.xml

How Maven works, in a nutshell

  • You create a file called pom.xml in the top level of your project
  • You arrange your source code (and other files, such as configuration files) strictly according to a particular directory structure required by Maven
  • You use commands such as mvn compile, mvn test and mvn package to compile, test, and package your code.
    • Package in this case, means to produce a .jar file for the project containing your compiled code.
    • We typically execute from the .jar file
  • You run by running the .jar file produced inside the target directory

References:

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