Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) is a build, deployment, and dependency management tool for Java-based projects. Maven really emphasizes convention over configuration. What this means is that it is very simple to start managing the build and deployment steps of our project with Maven by following simple conventions. We don't have to write a lot of custom tasks to get started, and therefore we can focus on the software itself, rather than spending a lot of time on how the software is built.

This can be contrasted with the Ant build file that we used in the previous section on Ant, even though that itself is a simple build file that doesn't do a lot of things. In the Ant build file, we had to use properties to specify the location of the source code, the directory where we wanted to generate the build output, and also the directory where we wanted to put the distribution. We then used these properties in various tasks, such as compiling and generating the JAR...