Today I want to propose you the review of another interesting Packt video training: Learning Apache Maven 3.

You can have a look to my previous review on a very similar topic here:  Video Review: Getting Started with Apache Maven

As per all Packt video course you can decide to watch it directly online with video streaming or download the full pack (approx 400Mb) to watch it offline. As usual all video code is available for download as well.

The course is divided in 4 macro section, the first one deal as usual with the typical activity of installing maven on your favorite operating system (Windows, Linux or OsX) and how to integrate it with the most typical development IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ )

Second section go straight to application creation using maven archetypes, creating them from command line and then importing them in the IDE.
Then a Unit test is introduced to manage automated testing of such application with maven testing functionalities.
After these two quick samples we go more in deep with Core Maven Plugin usage, build process Lifecycle, Repositories, Super-Pom concepts.

All this concepts introduce the more interesting chapter of the course: Maven Web Application.
In this chapter Maven usage will be applied to generate in Web application in a quick way, integrating it with Tomcat application server. After this preliminary step we will perform another deep dive into core dependency management functionalities, understanding their usage, best practice, managing exclusion and optional dependencies.

Such section is available as a sample of the full course on youtube, so you can have a direct look at it:

Back to our application we will then add the Spring + Struts2 framework to our project to provide a full presentation/business logic layer and Hibernate libraries for database persistence.
I consider this (and next) chapter the core of the whole course since it show how to create a full MVC compliant java web application using some state-of-the art frameworks in few minutes.

Consider that each framework is made up of several set of libraries and configuration files, so manually assemble the same base structure without maven support would take a couple of hours even for experienced developers (supposing no manual-error would occur causing additional delay for troubleshooting)

Final chapter is dedicate to multi module project and we will rearrange our previous application using a WebService client-server approach, separating all different components in a separate maven module and refactoring our code to move to a full WS.

Summarizing my impression on this course is that it efficiently completes the previous video training.
The first one was a pure-maven concepts, while this new course put the light on the real maven usage: creating application skeleton and full test-driven and ready-to-deploy build environment.

All maven benefits are immediately clear even to maven newbies who are shown how introducing maven can drastically speedup their everyday work pushing developers to best practices.

For any additional information on this video course you can refer to Packt official page: http://bit.ly/1kvveqf