Is effective-pom a merge between super pom and application POM

Question

I have tried to generate effective pom on sample application using mvn help:effective-pom command. http://books.sonatype.com/mvnref-book/reference/pom-relationships-sect-po

Answer 1

Effective POM is composed of Super POM + Application POM(s) + settings.xml contents + plugins bound to the lifecycle by default based on the packaging type chosen (thus, based on one element in the Application POM).

You asked about maven-jar-plugin and maven-compiler-plugin. These are bound to the lifecycle by default because your application POM specifies jar packaging.

You can see the default bindings in $YOUR_REPO_LOCATION\org\apache\maven\maven-core\3.0.x\maven-core-3.0.x.jar\META-INF\plexus\components.xml or in the documentation.