[maven] Use plugin and develop new plugin

Maven is a plugin execution platform. At its heart, all work is done by plugins.There are two kinds of plugins: build plugin and reporting plugin.Build plugin will be executed during the build and they should be configured in the <build> element from POM.Here are the plugin list referred from maven office site:plugin list.In addtion, there are also useful plugins from third party like codehaus:maven plugin list.

To use a plugin in maven, there are also two ways. One is using the plugin's goal in the command line directly, the other is binding the plugin's goal to life-cycle's phase.I will take Maven Exec Plugin for example to show how to use it in this recipe.

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.2.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            ...
            <goals>
              <goal>java</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
        <configuration>
          <mainClass>com.example.Main</mainClass>
          <arguments>
            <argument>argument1</argument>
            ...
          </arguments>
          <systemProperties>
            <systemProperty>
              <key>myproperty</key>
              <value>myvalue</value>
            </systemProperty>
            ...
          </systemProperties>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
   ...
</project>

You can use <phase>clean</phase> inside of <execution> element to run com.example.Main class during clean life-cycle.There is an interesting plugin forAndroid:https://github.com/jayway/maven-android-plugin. You can use this plugin to buildandroidproject if you developandroidprojects.