The roots of Maven go back to the Jakarta Turbine project, which 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 by itself, but rather delegates to a plugin framework. When you download Maven from its website, it's only the core framework, and the plugins are downloaded on demand. All the useful functionalities in the build process are developed as Maven plugins. You can also call Maven a plugin execution framework. The following figure shows the Maven plugins:
A Maven plugin can be executed on its own or can be executed as a part of a Maven lifecycle. We will discuss Maven lifecycles in Chapter 5, Build Lifecycles.