Keep Your Maven Projects Portable Throughout the Build Cycle

f your software development lifecycle is anything like mine, it has several phases that each requires its own project configurations—which can make moving a project through all the different phases a challenge. For instance, your development phase may require you to connect to a local database, but your integration test environment database won't be local. And your test database will certainly differ from your production database (for your sake, I hope it does.).

Apache Maven 2 can help. It enables you to create a single portable Project Object Model (POM), which will relieve the integration tester and the deployment team from making changes to the project. In addition to providing enforcement of project structure, project dependency management, project encapsulation, built-in site generation, and simple integration with tools such as Subversion and Continuum, Maven aims to make portability as simple as possible while maintaining flexibility. To that end, Maven has two main tools to deal with build portability issues: properties and profiles. (See "Sidebar 1. From Make to Maven" for a closer look at the history of Java-build portability.)