Is Maven suitable for a small Java project?

Question

Being a beginner in Java SE development, I am quite interested in using Maven to manage and organize my project properly.

However, though I am more than willing to learn how to use it, I don't want to spend more time understanding Maven than actually coding. Yes, I know about Maven's perks and drawbacks, I am only worried about the learning curve.

This project will last 5 months, with a single developer — yet more people might have to maintain it later. I know larger projects are very successful with it, but is using Maven worth it in my case, or is it a waste of time?

Maven's dependency management alone is probably worth using, even if you ignore the other features... — , Apr 16 '13 at 08:54
Maven will provide structure to the project out-of-the-box (conventions on directories and such). More important it is easy to have many small module projects, hierarchically organized, thus having layers of code, without recursive dependencies. _I use it for one-man projects especially._ — Joop Eggen, Apr 16 '13 at 09:24

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 08:58

Maven looks complicated at first, but it really is a huge time saver once you know the basics. Starting is not that hard, and the experience will be really useful for any other future java project of pretty much any size. I'd go for it. Do you have 5 minutes? ;)

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 16 '13 at 08:57

6

I think that the time you will spend setting up Maven for a small project

bootstrapping the project
tweaking plugin options if needed ( java source / target etc )
adding dependencies

will be as small as or possibly smaller than setting up Ant for a small project.

Maven is especially simple when the projects are small and don't have special requirements, so your use case would fit it perfectly.

answered Apr 16 '13 at 08:57

Robert Munteanu

67,031
36
206
278

Thank you. (I was afraid to mention Ant myself!) – Aeronth Apr 16 '13 at 19:15

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 08:55

You do not need to learn much about maven to use it and in any case you will use some or the other build tool to build your project so why not maven.

Out of the box without any configuration maven does most of the standard things for you so you not need to go deeper.

If you use Eclipse then you can create new Project using maven via eclipse which will generate the default maven pom.xml for you.

As you need more features out of maven you can learn and use them.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 08:58

Better off going ahead with Maven since the project might evolve with time sometimes and other developers who will work on it in the future will thank you for that :). Of course you can achieve the same with Ant+Ivy, yet in my opinon maven will be easy to set up and start running with miniml effort. Also you do not have to worry about dependent jars which will be transitivly bundled as required.

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 10:39

For a first timer, it could be really overwhelming. As mentioned in one of the comments, the most useful thing for your small project will be Dependency Management.

I would say it depends on the project you are undertaking. If you simply need to build a JAR or WAR you could in fact save a lot of time which would be needed to write say an ANT script. If you expect to tweak your build process too much, I would recommend of not using Maven.

Is Maven suitable for a small Java project?

5 Answers5