Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to show a migration path from an existing build in Ant to Maven.

The Maven migration example is based on the Spring Framework build, which uses an Ant script. This example will take you through the step-by-step process of migrating Spring to a modularized, component-based, Maven build.

You will learn how to start building with Maven, while still running your existing, Ant-based build system. This will allow you to evaluate Maven’s technology, while enabling you to continue with your required work.

You will learn how to use an existing directory structure (though you will not be following the standard, recommended Maven directory structure), how to split your sources into modules or components, how to run Ant tasks from within Maven, and among other things, you will be introduced to the concept of dependencies.