Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. based on the concept of a project object model (pom), maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

maven's primary goal is to allow a developer to comprehend the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time. in order to attain this goal there are several areas of concern that maven attempts to deal with:

* making the build process easy
* providing a uniform build system
* providing quality project information
* providing guidelines for best practices development
* allowing transparent migration to new features
the maven ear plugin generates a j2ee enterprise archive (ear) file.