Eclipse – Maven “Module” vs “Project” (Eclipse, m2eclipse plugin)

eclipsem2eclipsemaven

I'm a beginner at Maven and I've played with it from a command line point of view a little, so now I was trying to use it in Eclipse; I installed the m2eclipse plugin to do so.

But I'm stumped from the very beginning! Apparently I've missed a bit of terminology somewhere along the line. I can't keep track of all these new Maven terms… What is a Maven Project, and what is a Maven Module? These are my options when creating a new project in the Maven category in Eclipse.

Best Answer

They are basically the same thing, but with one difference.
When you create a module, you must specify a parent project.
When you specify the parent project, it adds a <modules> section to the parent projects pom.xml.
That section basically says to the parent project:
run every command I get against all of my modules first
So for example, if you run, mvn package on the top-level project, it will run mvn package against all its module projects first.

Hope that helps.

Hint:
Make sure all modules have high cohesion and related to each other, otherwise you will have a huge messy project without applying SRP (Single Responsibility Principle)

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