An introduction to Maven

We will use Maven to build our plugin. If you are unfamiliar with Maven, don't worry—the main point of Maven is that you don't necessarily need to know a lot about Maven to use it and to get a lot from it!

For a build tool that's quite unusual, you may well have expected yourself to be knee-deep in configuration files and code. However, Maven works quite well without these due to the core philosophy that is at its heart: it uses convention over configuration.

Maven works on the assumption that you and your project are following a set of standard, sensible conventions. These are nothing too weird or onerous, so if you are following this path, then Maven should just know where everything is and what you would like to achieve and will help you get up and running very quickly and easily.

One of these core assumptions is related to your project structure; specifically, if you are using a directory layout like this:

Item	Default dir (relative to the project directory)
source...