A criticism I hear often about Maven is, “every time you run Maven, it downloads the internet.” I understand the criticism, as the first time you run Maven it has to populate your local repository. Maven downloads plugins and artifacts that your project depends on. Maven does in fact download artifacts from remote repositories, but it downloads the artifact once and keeps a local cache.
Maven only downloads most of these dependencies because you’ve added them to your project. If you are unhappy that Maven is “downloading the internet” then stop developing software that depends on external libraries. Easy, right? Stop using Spring and Hibernate, stop referencing the commons libraries, and do everything yourself. This would be one way to avoid downloading any artifacts from a remote repository. Stop using Maven to build your software and write your own build tool that has all of the capabilities of Maven and every imaginable Maven plugin baked into it.
Not a workable solution, right? The fact of the matter is that your software has dependencies on external libraries. If you find yourself constantly “downloading the internet” there’s a reason. You are depending on projects that depend on “the internet” or, your projects have a very wide set of dependencies that may need to be trimmed.
How can we avoid creating projects and POMs that “download the internet”? The simple answer is that everyone needs to start focusing on dependencies. Library developers need to be smarter about creating leaner, meaner dependency lists, and you need to start evaluating your own dependencies with an eye on efficiency.
