Maven Repositories

Maven is one of the most popular build systems for Java programmers. With Maven, software libraries are published and stored on a central repository, unsurprisingly called Maven central. This repository is hosted on an apache.org domain since Maven is an Apache product. When a library is pulled from a Maven repository, it is stored locally for caching purposes; the next time the library is required, it is obtained from a local cache rather than from the central repository. You can imagine that as time goes on, both the central and, to a lesser extent, the local repositories grow at an enormous rate.

With the Maven repositories being so large, knowing the details about a package that we wish to use becomes increasingly complex. Fortunately, the Maven Repositories section of the Services window allows us to search and browse the packages that are installed on both the Maven central and our own local Maven repositories. Expanding the Repositories node shows a list of all the...