Maven Jar 库的项目存储库

Question

I'm trying to add Maven to already existing java project. It's been quite an adventure. I've read many questions here but I don't quite get it. The app I'm building is kinda modular so I'm loading many classes from URL so that the need of replacing the.exe (wrapped jar) file is at its minimum (Cuz once opened by any user I'cant update - replace the app (.exe)).

Since I'm using wide variety of libraries and the app Jar, hense the.exe, became too large - ~80MB, and slow to open from fileshare. Hense the need of Maven (or so I think). Since I installed Maven I had to add package statement at the top of every class, because before then there was not such thing, nor the need for it. Maven found the dependencies online and for the most part the process was not so time consuming, but the goal is to load the libraries from the project(app) folder /lib/. There I have all the libraries in jar files that I need. My question is: Is there a need of installing the libraries to local m2 directory (as I've read) since the app should always load them from the app folder? How do I configure the POM so the project/lib/ directory is recognized as a repo (or even is this the right approach), and load the libraries from the relative path of the project folder? Thanks in advance to anyone able and willing to help!

Answer 1

Maven's core objective is to manage dependencies. You can add a dependency to your project, by configuring it in pom.xml, maven will download the dependency from the maven central repository & when building the project, maven can help you create a runnable JAR that have all your dependencies & code compiled.

Let's say in your current project if all of the dependencies are absolutely necessary, then even after migrating the project to maven, you're runnable JAR will remain the same size. There won't be any reduction in your application size. However, I would highly recommend migrating your project to any build tool like gradle or maven to manage project dependencies.