What is the difference in maven between dependency and plugin tags in pom xml?

Question

I\'m new to the maven tool, I have made a project with Spring and Hibernate and they are configured in pom.xml as plugins, but JUnit is tagged under dependency. My questio

Answer 1

If you're coming from a front-end background like me, and are familiar with Grunt and npm, think of it like this:

First you would run, say, npm install grunt-contrib-copy --save-dev. This is like maven's . It downloads the files needed to execute a build task.

Then you would configure the task in Gruntfile.js

copy: {
  main: {
    src: 'src/*',
    dest: 'dest/',
  },
}

This is like maven's /. You are telling the build tool what to do with the code downloaded by npm/.

Of course this is not an exact analogy, but close enough to help wrap your head around it.