Maven "Module" vs "Project" (Eclipse, m2eclipse plugin)
I'm a beginner at Maven and I've played with it from a command line point of view a little, so now I was trying to use it in Eclipse; I installed the m2eclipse plugin to do so.
But I'm stumped from the very beginning! Apparently I've missed a bit of terminology somewhere along the line. I can't keep track of all these new Maven terms... What is a Maven Project, and what is a Maven Module? These are my options when creating a new project in the Maven category in Eclipse.
Answer
They are basically the same thing, but with one difference. When you create a module, you must specify a parent project. When you specify the parent project, it adds a <modules> section to the parent projects pom.xml. That section basically says to the parent project, "run every command I get against all of my modules first". So if you run, "mvn package" on the top level project, it will run "mvn package" against all it's module projects first.
Hope that helps.