Bintray advertises itself as a Distribution as a Service. This means that when we have something we want to distribute, for example our project artifacts, we can use Bintray. Bintray offers a platform to store the software we want to share and makes it accessible for others to download. Around this, there is a lot of tooling to provide insights into how the packages are distributed and used. Bintray also offers a REST API to make it easy to work with the platform. The company running Bintray is JFrog, which is very well known for its repository product, Artifactory.

A part of Bintray is called JCenter. JCenter hosts Java dependencies within the Bintray platform. We already learned about JCenter as a repository host for dependencies. However, we can also use JCenter as a distribution repository for our own dependencies. In this chapter, we are going to use JCenter to deploy our artifacts.