Maven is a framework that provides help with managing the project lifecycle, including building and managing dependencies. Maven projects follow a set of standards that are described with a project object model (POM) to ensure consistency between projects.
When using Maven as the build infrastructure for Java projects, Maven uses conventions and patterns in order to provide a uniform build system. All Maven projects use a shared set of plugins that are retrieved from the Maven repository and Maven executes a defined series of tasks as part of the lifecycle when building the project. Unlike Ant, you do not need to explicitly specify all the tasks required for building a project.
Maven support in the IDE includes the following features:
For information about developing projects in the IDE using Maven, see the Maven best practices wiki page.
For more information about using Maven, see the Maven documentation.