Maven is a tool that automates project builds, documentation and dependencies, among other things.

The initial objective of Maven was to create standard builds, allowing any developer that needed to build a Maven compatible project to know exactly what needed to be done. But as the project evolved, and with many plug-ins created, Maven has become a very sophisticated tool, allowing for many activities in the project life cycle, like  generating reports about the source code, building sites with documentation, script execution and much more.

Many projects have adopted Maven and it is very common to find open source Maven compatible projects. Maven can be used with projects in many different languages, but it is far more popular in Java-bases projects.

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