Is Maven a framework that provides mainly an archetype like domain.controller-view in grails?

Question

I´ve been reading lot about, but since there are several web frameworks that uses Maven for the project, I got confused, so I´m not entirely sure if Maven is an archetype that defines an schema to start developing apps by following good practices, or is just some piece of sdk that converts my code to bytecode. Thanks in advance to anyone who can drag me out of my confusion and gave me the required info. BTW is that rigth to say an archetype is a directory structure?

Answer 1

I am not sure if you are reading enough about maven, Maven is a build system which can help you build your application, manage your dependencies, run your tests, create reports and many other things.

First link in google result is http://maven.apache.org/

Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

Each application has many dependencies and many small tasks that needs to be done before you can run your application, developers define them in a file called POM and that will be a instruction for Maven to build the application. Maven can do pretty much everything other than writing your code. In that sense it is like Genie in the story of Aladdin, you wish for something it will bring it for you.

There is a Grails maven plugin that can populate Grails project with the same convention that Grails uses. It can work with Grails to execute your commands and many other. More importantly it will manage your dependencies.