I have been using Maven 3.0.3 on my work machine since 2011 because that particular version was released in March that year. How time flies by…
Maven 3.2.1 was released exactly a month ago. One feature that immediately jumps out is the ability to exclude a dependency’s transitive dependencies in a very simple manner, which is incredibly sweet and tasty.
Instead of manually excluding each transitive dependency one by one, we can use *
wildcard now. Here’s an example from the release note:-
<?xml version="1.0"?> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.maven</groupId> <artifactId>maven-embedder</artifactId> <version>3.1.0</version> <exclusions> <exclusion> <groupId>*</groupId> <artifactId>*</artifactId> </exclusion> </exclusions> </dependency> ... </dependencies>
Okay, I have made an executive decision here… that I’ll upgrade Maven on my work machine to this latest version.