Maven: The Definitive Guide

Optimizing Plugins

If we take a look at the various plugin configurations, we can see the HSQLDB dependencies duplicated in several places. Unfortunately, dependencyManagement doesn’t apply to plugin dependencies, but we can still use a property to consolidate the versions. Most complex Maven multimodule projects tend to define all versions in the top-level POM. This top-level POM then becomes a focal point for changes that affect the entire project. Think of version numbers as string literals in a Java class; if you are constantly repeating a literal, you’ll likely want to make it a variable so that when it needs to be changed, you have to change it in only one place. Rolling up the version of HSQLDB into a property in the top-level POM yields the following properties element:

<project>
  ...
  <properties>
    <hibernate.annotations.version>3.3.0.ga</hibernate.annotations.version>
    <hsqldb.version>1.8.0.7</hsqldb.version>
  </properties>
  ...
</project>

The next thing we notice is that the hibernate3-maven-plugin configuration is duplicated in the simple-webapp and simple-command modules. We can manage the plugin configuration in the top-level POM just as we managed the dependencies in the top-level POM with the dependencyManagement section. To do this, we use the pluginManagement element in the top-level POM’s build element:

<project> ... <build> <pluginManagement> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> ...