Apache Maven is already a built-in plugin in Eclipse and helps developers manage projects and use some build tools to clean, install, and deploy Eclipse projects. It has the main configuration file which is called the Project Object Model (POM) file.

POM is the fundamental unit of work in Maven that contains information and configuration details about the project. Some core information in POM is <modelVersion>, which currently must be set to 4.0.0, <groupId>, that identifies the project uniquely together with <projectId> and <versionId> across all projects in the Maven repository, <artifactId>, which is the name of the WAR file without the version, and <packaging>, which is WAR.

Later in this book, we will be adding <properties> and <dependencies> and <plugins> for our Spring 5.0 code recipes in our pom.xml file.