Chapter 2. Demystifying Project Object Model

Project Object Model (POM) is at the heart of any Maven project. This chapter focuses on core concepts and best practices related to POM in building a large-scale, multimodule Maven project.

As we proceed with this chapter, we will be discussing the following topics:

• The POM hierarchy, super POM, and parent POM
• Extending and overriding POM files
• Maven coordinates
• Managing dependencies
• Transitive dependencies
• Dependency scopes and optional dependencies

  Note

  In Maven 1, the equivalent to today's pom.xml file was identified as project.xml. Maven 2 renamed it to pom.xml. More details about the POM are available at http://maven.apache.org/pom.html.