Getting more out of Maven

When I switched to Maven, I knew I wasn't using all of it's potential. I'm sure I still don't, but I've learned much nontheless. For the last months, I worked (for pay, that is) on another software project. The necessary steps to build the software were nontrivial, and I had the task and thus the time to research how to do it. Over the months I worked there, the project's POM has become a stably working thing, whihc indeed is nice when trying a relatively new technology. Speaking of new technologies, I finally managed to learn a little LaTeX, when we had to do the docs in the end... but that's another story. I wonder if I'll be able to ever bring that into a Magic context.

Now that my internship/scholarship ended, I had a little time and wanted to clean up the messy POMs I previously created. My first step was to update my eclipse version. 3.7 Indigo comes with a new version of the Maven plugin. While I was sceptical during my internship, I found that it's pretty usable now. It even has some nice features that make it feel superior to the old one, e.g. the ability to jump to definitions of replacement variables, plugins, dependencies etc.; and the ability to view the "effective" POM. While the old version had that, I was never really sure it worked... could be that my POMs were just so simple that the physical and effective POMs were the same... Whatever, what I experienced was that viewing the effective POM of your project actually shows you how much configurations there are you could take a look at.

I have the feeling that when one tries a tool to automate something, it first seems very nice and practical. Unfortunately, many tools show the "bad behavior" that when the ammount of things to manage grows, even that becomes confusing.
The same thing was with Maven. The only feature I previously used was to declare a project's dependencies. As the Laterna project grew by separating parts of the software into different projects, there were now many components which had dependencies. Let's say I discover a bug in the Config file format project and increment its version number. If multiple modules depend on the file format, I have to change three things in total: the file format version number, and the two modules' dependency version numbers.
As an alternative, I could try to have the dependency number only in one module, and since the second module has a dependency on the first (let's just assume that), it has an indirective dependency on the (now) new version. But that's also not a clean way of doing it; at least if the second really needs Config on its own. When the first module is changed so that it doesn't need config any more, this would mean I had to include it into the second then, and that's not too nice.

Well, luckily, there's two features of Maven which do the job together. The first are the "management" sections: these declare configurations (such as versions) for dependencies, plugins and other things, without making them effective. Together with the second, this even sounds like something useful: parent projects.
Every project can have a parent project from which it inherits its configurations. The dependencyManagement section allows me to specify dependency versions for every library in the parent POM without mandating that every child POM depends on all the libraries. The child POM can then add the identification of the library in the dependency section, and all the configuration from the management section applies to it.
The same goes for plugins: I can specify that if a project uses the antlr plugin, it wants to invoke antlr's code generator so I don't have to duplicate that code over and over.

So, I learned something new and exciting about Maven. I really like the design of it, how the predefined lifecycle is combined with the ability to add any plugin to do whatever job is necessary, and not only there's a way to do the necessary things, there's even a way to specify them in a clean, reusable manner.