Why Maven: Convention over Configuration

Convention is at the heart of Maven. Convention over configuration is a popular aphorism these days, and Maven fully embraces this concept. Convention over configuration is at the central philosophy of frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, and more recently, the EJB3 specification. In its most basic sense it means that, while configuration is certainly necessary, the majority of users will never utilize such edge-cases those complex configurations provide. Although a powerful framework certainly needs to have the power to configure when necessary, it is certainly reasonable to create defaults to allow the 95% of similar use-cases to work without defining anything at all... the system can assume these defaults. In other words, the system has its own convention. Because of this, the monstrous configurations required of build tools like Ant (where a majority of Ant scripts are cut-and-pasted from existing projects) are non-existent for those projects that follow Maven's conventions.

Another driving force behind the popularity of convention over configuration is the speed at which new users may pick up a new technology, or the speed by which a seasoned user may begin using the tool without concerning him/herself with details that need not come up until later in the development process. The computer world is finally beginning to embrace the idea that ease of use and reduced configurations do not have to interfere with the power of advanced configurability. Convention and configuration reside together within the Maven world, each providing their own unique perspective of a power tool.