Maven is a framework that provides help with managing the project lifecycle, including building and managing dependencies. Maven projects follow a set of standards that are described with a Project Object Model (POM) to ensure consistency between projects.
When using Maven as the build infrastructure for Java projects, Maven uses conventions and patterns in order to provide a uniform build system. All Maven projects use a shared set of plugins that are retrieved from the Maven repository and Maven executes a defined series of tasks as part of the lifecycle when building the project. Unlike Ant, you do not need to explicitly specify all the tasks required for building a project.
Maven support in the IDE includes the following features.
For information about developing projects in the IDE using Maven, see the Maven best practices wiki page.
For more information about using Maven, see the Maven documentation.