From the course: Introducing Maven

What you need to know

From the course: Introducing Maven

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What you need to know

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- [Instructor] Before we jump into working with Apache Maven, I want to spend a bit of time level-setting on the knowledge and tools you will need to be successful in this course. Starting with the skills you need, I'm not going to focus much time on the actual Java code. That isn't the focus of this course. As such, I'm going to expect you to know how to write some basic Java. I would like you to also know a little bit about how Java artifacts work and are packaged. While this isn't a core prerequisite, it will help you better understand the time-savings that Apache Maven is providing, and why it is such a valuable tool to have in your toolbox. One of the most important skills you need to know is knowledge of proper XML syntax. Apache Maven configuration is defined in an XML file, and, as such, you need to know how to read and be able to write proper XML documents. Now, since this course is on Apache Maven, you should have the tool installed on your machine. Now, I'm not going to go through the steps, they're pretty simple, but I do want to point out some of the high-level needs. First and foremost, you need Java installed on your machine, and specifically, a JDK. I'm going to be running Java 11 on my machine, but you should be able to do everything with any modern, supported version of the JDK. You will need to have Maven installed on your machine. The installation is really just an unpacking of the download file, if you are doing a manual install. However, if you're using a Mac, for instance, there's a tool called Homebrew to do most of these steps. And there are similar ways to do this with other operating systems. You then need to ensure that Maven executable is on your path. This executable is named MVN, or Maven. Now, many times, you will see references to M2_HOME in Maven documentation. This isn't a requirement of any operating system, or of Maven itself. It's just a convention of pointing to the root directory with an environment variable, and then, adding the bin directory under that environment variable to your path. More formal instructions are located on the Apache Maven projects website. Finally, you need somewhere to work in. As such, you need an IDE or a text editor to make all of your changes. Really, it doesn't make a difference what you use, but sometimes, syntax highlighting and formatting is a nice benefit of modern text editors, or IDE's. However, you can use Vim if you want to. I will be using IntelliJ Ultimate edition. I will have some nice features at my disposal that I may use. However, all of the tooling is available through manual operations in your text editor or IDE if you don't have equivalent functions. And that really is all we need to get started, so let's jump in to Apache Maven.

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