在JAR中构建maven多模块项目

Question

I have a parent Maven project (pom packaging) and 4 Maven modules (jar packaging) as children of that. Is there any way/plugin to create a importable dependency of the parent project including all the children? I mean that I want to create some kind of abstraction, so when somebody wants to import my project, it won't be necessary to import a specific childermodule (the module that he will use), he will just import the whole project (all the children modules)

Answer 1

The Maven parent project corresponds with inheritance . It is meant the children projects to inherit the settings, so you do not have to repeat them and you may set all the common stuff in a single place.

On other side, the convenience Maven project containing dependencies corresponds with composition .

You should not mix these two things together. Parent project is a common super-class of your modules. This convenience project you wish to have is a collection containing all your modules as dependencies. You should not want the the Animal class to depend on all the animals.

Just accept the fact that you need two separate Maven projects:

1. the parent (if you need it), and
2. the convenience project for transitive dependencies.

The solution for your problem is described eg here: 3.6.1. Grouping Dependencies

If you have a set of dependencies which are logically grouped together. You can create a project with pom packaging that groups dependencies together. For example, let's assume that your application uses Hibernate... Every project which uses Hibernate might also have a dependency on the Spring Framework and a MySQL JDBC driver. Instead of having to include these dependencies in every project that uses Hibernate, Spring, and MySQL you could create a special POM that does nothing more than declare a set of common dependencies. You could create a project called persistence-deps (short for Persistence Dependencies), and have every project that needs to do persistence depend on this convenience project.