An important part of a Maven publication is the POM file. We already saw that Gradle added a generatePom<publicationName> task to our project. Furthermore, we can define some properties of the POM file inside a publication configuration. Gradle also offers a hook to customize the generated POM file even further.

Gradle uses the project's version, group, and name properties in the generated POM file. We create a new example build file where we define the project properties so that they are included in the POM file. The following code shows this:

apply plugin: 'maven-publish'
apply plugin: 'java'

// Defined project properties, that are
// used in the generated POM file.
// The name of the project is by default
// the directory name, but we can
// change it via a settings.gradle file
// and the rootProject.name property.
version = '2.1.RELEASE'
group = 'book.gradle'

repositories {
  jcenter()
}

dependencies {
  compile 'org.springframework:spring-context:4.1.4.RELEASE...