1.1.1. What is Maven?

1.1.1. What is Maven?

Maven是什么？
Maven is a project management framework, but this doesn't tell you much about Maven. It's the most
obvious three-word definition of Maven the authors could come up with, but the term project
management framework is a meaningless abstraction that doesn't do justice to the richness and
complexity of Maven. Too often technologists rely on abstract phrases to capture complex topics in
three or four words, and with repetition phrases such as project management and enterprise software
start to lose concrete meaning.

Maven是一个项目管理的框架，但是这并没有告诉更多关于Maven。Maven作者提出的，它的最
显而易见三个词的定义，不过管理架构的术语，是一种毫无意义的抽象定义，没有正确的描述丰富性和
复杂的Maven。往往技术专家依靠抽象三个或四个词或者循环的短语捕捉复杂的课题，如项目管理和企业软件
开始失去了具体的意义。

When someone wants to know what Maven is, they expect a short, sound-bite answer. “Well, it is a
build tool or a scripting framework.” Maven is more than three boring, uninspiring words. It is a
combination of ideas, standards, and software, and it is impossible to distill the definition of Maven to
simply digested sound-bites. Revolutionary ideas are often difficult to convey with words. If you are
interested in a fuller, richer definition of Maven read this introduction; it will prime you for the concepts
that are to follow. If you are reading this introduction just to find something to tell your manager1, you
can stop reading now and skip to Chapter 2.

当有人想知道什么是 Maven，他们期望一个短的，可靠的答案。 "好，它是一个
建立工具或脚本框架" 。Maven是超越这个三个枯燥的，丧气的单词。它是一个
相结合的思路，标准和软件，它是不可能提取的定义。革命思想往往难以转换乘文字。如果你是
有兴趣获取一个更全面，更丰富的定义，阅读这本导言;它将给您准备下面的概念。
如果你正在阅读本导言只是为了找一些要告诉你manager1 ，你
可以停止阅读，现在跳到第2章。

So, what exactly is Maven? Maven encompasses a set of build standards, an artifact repository
model, and a software engine that manages and describes projects. It defines a standard life cycle for
building, testing, and deploying project artifacts. It provides a framework that enables easy reuse of
common build logic for all projects following Maven's standards. The Maven project at the Apache
Software Foundation is an open source community which produces software tools that understand a
common declarative Project Object Model (POM). This book focuses on the core tool produced by the
Maven project, Maven 2, a framework that greatly simplifies the process of managing a software
project.

那么，究竟是什么Maven？Maven包含了一套构建标准，是一个产品仓库
模型和管理并描述项目软件引擎。它为构建、测试、部署工程产品定义了一个标准的生命周期
。它提供了一个框架，使易于重用共同构建逻辑的所有遵循Maven标准的项目。Maven项目在阿帕奇
软件基金会是一个开放源码社群，其中生产软件工具，提出了一个
共同宣示性项目目标模式（ POM ） 。这本书着重于核心工具制作所
Maven项目，Maven2 ，一个框架，极大地简化了管理软件工程的过程。

You may have been expecting a more straightforward answer. Perhaps you picked up this book
because someone told you that Maven is a build tool. Don't worry, Maven can be the build tool you
need, and many developers who have approached Maven as another build tool have come away with
a finely tuned build system. While you are free to use Maven as “just another build tool”, to view it in
such limited terms is akin to saying that a web browser is nothing more than a tool that reads
hypertext.

你可能已经期待一个更直接的答案。也许你拿起这本书
因为有人告诉你，Maven 是一个构建的工具。你不用担心，Maven 可以作为你需要的工具，和许多开发者一样，他们接触Maven，是 作为另一个构建工具，精确的构建系统。而你可以自由的使用Maven "只是另一个构建工具" ，看待它查看它在如此好像在说一个网络浏览器，完全是一个阅读内容超文本的工具。

Maven, and the technologies related to the Maven project, are beginning to have a transformative
effect on the Java community.
In addition to solving straightforward, first-order problems such as simplifying builds, documentation,
distribution, and the deployment process, Maven also brings with it some compelling second-order
benefits.
1 You can tell your manager: “Maven is a declarative project management tool that decreases your overall time
to market by effectively leveraging cross-project intelligence. It simultaneously reduces your duplication
effort and leads to higher code quality .”

As more and more projects and products adopt Maven as a foundation for project management, it
becomes easier to understand the relationships between projects and to establish a system that
navigates and reports on these relationships. Maven's standard formats enable a sort of "Semantic
Web" for programming projects. Maven's standards and centralized repository model offer an easy-touse
naming system for projects. Using Maven has made it easier to add external dependencies and
publish your own project components.
So, to answer the original question: Maven is many things to many people. It is a set of standards and
an approach to project development, as much as it is a piece of software. Maven is a way of
approaching a set of software as a collection of highly-interdependent components, which can be
described in a common format. It is the next step in the evolution of how individuals and organizations
collaborate to create software systems. Once you get up to speed on the fundamentals of Maven, you
will wonder how you ever developed without it.

译者声明：

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