CODEWITHSUNDEEP
maven
sandy
sandy

Reputation: 111

Transitive dependencies in maven

I have read about transitive dependency in maven but it makes me little confused. can anyone please explain about transitive dependency in maven and what are the advantages and disadvantages.Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2458

Answers (2)

khmarbaise
khmarbaise

Reputation: 97399

Start very simple. Assume you are using a library like the Apache Tika lib. So you express this by defining a dependency in your pom file by something like this:

<project...>

  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>..</groupId>
      <artifactId>tika-core</artifactId>
      <version>1.19</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>

</project>

The Tika lib also has dependencies on its own which mean the dependencies of Tika are expressed in their pom file and those dependencies are called Transitive Dependencies.

The simple advantage is that you don't need to think about the transitive dependencies. This means you only need to think: I would like to use Tika lib and don't need to bother about their dependencies...

So If you use a class of Tika core in your code you have the dependency available. One tip about best practice is: If you are using a class of a transitive dependency, then make it a direct dependency (add it to your pom file).

Upvotes: 5

avi.elkharrat
avi.elkharrat

Reputation: 6790

Maven documentation assumes that you already know what a transitive dependency is. This may not be the case! So let's dive in...

First things first

A transitive dependency is

A depends on B
B does not depend on A
B depends on C

==> Therefore A depends on C

It's as simple as that.

The good news is

Maven is great at managing dependencies! From Maven documentation:

Maven avoids the need to discover and specify the libraries that your own dependencies require by including transitive dependencies automatically.

So most of the time you won't have to bother about it.

And beyond

However, Maven understands you may need more advanced features, therefore, it proposes several dependency related mechanisms, such as dependency management, mediation, scope, exclusion and optional.

Dependency management, for example, is a very popular feature, because it enforces the versions of dependencies used by a project or a set of project.
Exclusion alows you to exclude transitive dependencies from a project. This feature is useful to manage dependencies incompatibility. And so on...

Upvotes: 3

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