The roots of Maven go back to the Jakarta Turbine project. It was started as an attempt to simplify the build process of Jakarta Turbine. The beauty of Maven is its design. It does not try to do everything itself, but rather delegate the work to a plugin framework. When you download Maven from its website, it's only the core framework and plugins are downloaded on demand. All the useful functionalities in the build process are developed as Maven plugins. You can also easily call Maven a plugin execution framework.

Maven plugins can be executed on their own or can be executed as a part of a Maven lifecycle. Maven lifecycles were discussed in Chapter 4, Build Lifecycles. Each plugin has its own set of goals. Let's see how to execute the clean goal of the Maven clean plugin, as follows. The clean goal will attempt to clean the working directory and the associated files created during the build:

$ mvn clean:clean