This section gives a brief overview of how to prepare Maven for building Red Hat JBoss Fuse projects and introduces the concept of Maven coordinates, which are used to locate Maven artifacts.

In order to build a project using Maven, you must have the following prerequisites:

In order to access artifacts from the Red Hat Maven repositories, you need to add them to Maven’s settings.xml file. Maven looks for your settings.xml file in the .m2 directory of the user’s home directory. If there is not a user specified settings.xml file, Maven will use the system-level settings.xml file at M2_HOME/conf/settings.xml.

To add the Red Hat repositories to Maven’s list of repositories, you can either create a new .m2/settings.xml file or modify the system-level settings. In the settings.xml file, add repository elements for the Red Hat repositories as shown in Adding the Red Hat JBoss Fuse Repositories to Maven.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<settings>

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>extra-repos</id>
      <activation>
        <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
      </activation>
      <repositories>
       <repository>
            <id>redhat-ga-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
            <id>redhat-ea-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/earlyaccess/all</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
          <id>jboss-public</id>
          <name>JBoss Public Repository Group</name>
          <url>https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/</url>
        </repository>
      </repositories>
      <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>redhat-ga-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>redhat-ea-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/earlyaccess/all</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
          <id>jboss-public</id>
          <name>JBoss Public Repository Group</name>
          <url>https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public</url>
        </pluginRepository>
      </pluginRepositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>extra-repos</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>

</settings>

The basic building block in the Maven build system is an artifact. The output of an artifact, after performing a Maven build, is typically an archive, such as a JAR or a WAR.

A key aspect of Maven functionality is the ability to locate artifacts and manage the dependencies between them. Maven defines the location of an artifact using the system of Maven coordinates, which uniquely define the location of a particular artifact. A basic coordinate tuple has the form, {groupId, artifactId, version}. Sometimes Maven augments the basic set of coordinates with the additional coordinates, packaging and classifier. A tuple can be written with the basic coordinates, or with the additional packaging coordinate, or with the addition of both the packaging and classifier coordinates, as follows:

groupdId:artifactId:version
groupdId:artifactId:packaging:version
groupdId:artifactId:packaging:classifier:version

Each coordinate can be explained as follows:

The group ID, artifact ID, packaging, and version are defined by the corresponding elements in an artifact’s POM file. For example:

<project ... >
  ...
  <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
  <packaging>bundle</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  ...
</project>

For example, to define a dependency on the preceding artifact, you could add the following dependency element to a POM:

<project ... >
  ...
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
      <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  ...
</project>