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Maven in Spring Framework

Maven in Spring Framework

What is Maven?

The Maven is a tool used for automation in Java projects. It is an open-source build tool that works under the Licence of Apache 2.0 and provides the ability to create, deploy, and publish various projects with its project management skills. The developers can utilize Maven to build their projects in several programming languages, including Java, Ruby, C#, Scala, and many others. Apache Maven is one of the best DevOps tools for time and cost-efficiency while working with complex programs. This automation tool is based on the POM (Project Object Model) and helps developers build the lifecycle framework.

Features of Maven

Maven provides a wide range of features that make it one of the best tools to work with while building complex solutions. This tool provides the ability to work with projects where the developers have to take care of project requirements, dependencies, and builds. Maven is a time and cost-efficient tool that handles these requirements through its project management abilities. It helps in automatically generating JAR and WAR files and directs the classpath to the project.

Moreover, Maven provides the developers with a convention over configuration approach for building management. The developers choose the required dependencies for their projects using Maven conventions, and the tool automatically downloads like a package system in most operating systems.

Advantages of Using Maven

Maven and Spring provide various benefits for developers. With minimum manual work and effort, the developers can build and publish their required applications using all the critical features of Maven. Below are some of the main benefits of Maven for developers:

Maven helps add JAR files and dependencies for the projects efficiently.
The developers benefit from using the Maven repositories for JAR and dependencies while working on updating the central repository.
The tool integrates various source control systems like Git or Subversion.
The developers can utilize this automation tool throughout working with a project, including documentation, the project builds, releases, project distribution management, and the underlying process.
The tool helps in automatically downloading all the required dependencies and JAR files that, as a result, increases the performance of the project-building process.
The automation tool takes care of the dependencies and underlying processes when the developers need to shift from one project environment to the other.

Maven Repositories

Maven offers different types of directories to store packages of JAR files having metadata. The metadata refers to the POM files related to every project and its respective package of JAR files. This metadata also includes all the external dependencies of the JAR files. Storing this information allows the automation tool to recursively download the required dependencies in the user’s local machine. Maven offers the following three types of repositories:

Local Repository

The local repository represents the local directory on the developer’s local machine. It contains all of the downloaded dependencies by the tool. The developers only have to download these dependencies once and can utilize them in various projects during the whole process.

Remote Repository

This repository refers to a directory on the web server. The developers can access this repository and download the required dependencies from this directory. The remote repository helps in hosting projects for organizations. The developers can download the dependencies from this repository to their local ones.

Central Repository

The central repository for Maven holds all the required dependencies that the Maven community might need at any point during the working of their project. The developers often work with their local repositories. However, if that directory does not provide any specific dependency that might be essential for the project, the developers can access the central repository to download that into the local one for later use.

Maven with Spring

Following are the examples and sample codes to illustrate the essential workings of Maven with Spring. The developers can utilize the sample codes and enhance them for their projects. Moreover, they can use the latest available Spring release for work.

Basic Maven Dependencies

The Spring framework uses a modular approach where every part has its sole identity and does not require the other module for its implementation. So, the developers can use specific models they require for the project development. The following example shows the usage of one of the Maven dependencies known as the spring context.

<properties>
   <org.springframework.version>5.2.8.RELEASE</org.springframework.version>
</properties>
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
   <version>${org.springframework.version}</version>
   <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

The spring-context dependency refers to the spring injection container. It has a minimal number of dependencies. Moreover, these dependencies include spring-aop, spring-core, spring-beans, and spring-expression. The dependency defined here uses the runtime scope, ensuring no compile-time dependencies on the Spring APIs.

Spring Persistence

The following piece of code helps use the spring persistence dependencies. The commonly used dependency among these is the spring-form.

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-orm</artifactId>
   <version>${org.springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

This dependency also provides support for JPA and Hibernate. This code helps incorporate support for various dependencies such as spring-jobs, and spring-tx, along with support for JpaTemplate, HibernateTemaplate, and many other relevant ones. The data access library for JDBC refers to the spring JDBC support and provides the abstraction for transaction management.

Maven with MVC

The developers need to include the relevant dependencies into the POM for using spring web and server support along with the core dependencies for the project development. The following piece of code helps in achieving this goal:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
   <version>${org.springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
   <version>${org.springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

Including the spring web dependency allows the developers to use web-specific utilities for portlet and servlet environments. On the other hand, including the spring webmvc library allows the developers to use the MVC model support for servlet environments. Moreover, if the developers include spring webmvc, they do not need to incorporate spring web separately.

Using Spring Test with Maven

The following code helps include the spring test framework in the project using the required dependency:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId>
   <version>${spring.version}</version>
   <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Milestones with Maven

Maven Central supports the hosting of the Spring Framework. If the developers need to add project milestones, they can use the custom spring repository in POM. After defining the repository, the developers can define the relevant dependency by using the following code:

<repositories>
   <repository>
       <id>repository.springframework.maven.milestone</id>
       <name>Spring Framework Maven Milestone Repository</name>
       <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone/</url>
   </repository>
</repositories>

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
   <version>5.3.0-M1</version>
</dependency>

Similarly, the developers can also include other features, such as snapshots using the relevant repository. They can also customize the code to achieve their required output. Moreover, the developers can use Maven if they have to update the dependency versions often and have to generate the documentation along with package compilations.