As developers, we spend just as much — if not more — time working on tasks that support our code rather than writing the code itself. This includes writing test cases, creating build and deployment scripts, structuring Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines, and managing the external dependencies that our projects rely upon. If handled incorrectly, these supports can grind our application development to a halt — regardless of how well our code is written.
Over the years, numerous tools have been developed to reduce the burden on developers, and many have become nearly as indispensable as programming languages themselves. In the Java ecosystem, one of the most popular of these tools is Maven. Maven is a management tool for Java (and Java-based languages) that has become so widely used that tens of millions of binaries from Maven projects have been packaged and hosted for public use.