What exactly is a Maven Snapshot and why do we need it?

Question

I am a bit confused about the meaning of a Maven Snapshot and why we build one?

Answer 1

A Maven SNAPSHOT is an artifact created by a Maven build and pretends to help developers in the software development cycle. A SNAPSHOT is an artifact (or project build result ) that is not pretended to be used anywhere, it's only a temporarily .jar, ear, ... created to test the build process or to test new requirements that are not yet ready to go to a production environment. After you are happy with the SNAPSHOT artifact quality, you can create a RELEASE artifact that can be used by other projects or can be deployed itself.

In your project, you can define a SNAPSHOT using the version element in the pom.xml file of Maven:

example.project.maven
MavenEclipseExample
0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
jar
Maven pom example

If you want to understand better Maven you can look into these articles too:

https://connected2know.com/programming/menu-maven-articles/