By Adrian Null
Maven is a build/project management tool. It favours “convention over configuration”; it can greatly simplify builds for “standard” projects and a Maven user can usually understand the structure of another Maven project just by looking at its pom.xml (Project Object Model). Maven is a plugin-based architecture, making it easy to add new libraries and modules to existing projects. For example, adding a new dependency usually involves only 5 extra lines in the pom.xml. These “artifacts” are downloaded from repositories such as The Central Repository.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://docs.scala-lang.org//tutorials/scala-with-maven.html