Using the Maven Compiler plugin

Compilation is an essential task performed by a build tool. Maven uses the Maven Compiler plugin to do the compilation. The plugin provides several configurations to make the compilation flexible.

How to do it...

To use the Maven Compiler plugin, perform the following steps:

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Run the following Maven command on the simple project that we created in the Creating a simple project with Maven recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started:

   mvn compile
   

3. Observe the output, which is as follows:

   [INFO] --- maven-compiler-plugin:2.3.2:compile (default-compile) @ simple-project ---
   [INFO] Compiling 1 source file to C:\projects\apache-maven-cookbook\simple-project\target\classes
   

How it works...

The compile parameter indicates the invocation of the default lifecycle to Maven. As illustrated in the Understanding the Maven lifecycle, phases, and goals recipe in Chapter 3, Maven Lifecycle, Maven runs all the phases up to and including the compile phase in order.

The...