Maven 4: New foundations for a classic structure by Anders Hammar & Robert Scholte

After about 15 years Apache Maven is aiming for a new major release - Maven 4. The main goal for the Apache Maven project is to keep backwards compatibility while providing for new features. Over the years we’ve built up a long wishlist of new features, but some of them cannot be implemented without changing the POM. And this has blocked progress because this is THE metadata file for dependencies in the Java ecosystem. With Maven 4 we aim at adding new features to the POM but still publish a backwards compatible metadata file. Even though this is a huge change which opens up the door for tons of other options, there are also other new features that Maven 4 will offer. This session will highlight the important changes in Maven 4 and explain the impact on existing Maven projects and their developers. Anders Hammar, Antigo Robert Scholte, Sourcegrounds Recorded at Jfokus 2025 in Stockholm 4th of february http://www.jfokus.se