5.2. Maven feature set

Maven is free and extensible and it’s distributed as a small core module. All features are implemented as plug-ins and are loaded on demand. These plug-ins are also stored in repositories. You (or other developers) can easily write plug-ins in Java or other scripting languages. Maven scripts can run Ant scripts and vice versa.

To get Maven running with its default settings (including its default repositories), you must start the standard Maven distribution. I’ll show you several examples of running Maven from the command line.