maven dependency without version

Question

Recently I've been working on some improvements in a project developed some time ago, and here's what I found. A lot of dependencies in the pom files go without versions specified, and yet they are resolved. The project consists of 1 root module and 2 submodules. The Aggregator pattern is used, meaning there's no dependencyManagement section at all. The upper-project simply aggregates 2 modules and that's all it does. Subprojects don't refer to it as to a parent. They have a different parent. What I can't grasp is that neither subprojects themselves nor their parent(as a matter of fact, it doesn't have dependencyManagement either) specify versions for some of the dependencies. For instance:

<dependency>
    <groupId>javax.mail</groupId>
    <artifactId>javax.mail-api</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.mail</groupId>
    <artifactId>javax.mail</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.mail</groupId>
    <artifactId>imap</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>jul-to-slf4j</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
    <artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId>
</dependency>

Can someone help me figure this out? Is maven handling versioning with some default strategy? What is that default strategy?

Answer 1

Ok, I think I'm gonna answer it myself. Of course I took a look at dependency:tree, but all the dependencies that I mentioned were first-level members of the tree. What I failed to notice right away, is that dependencyManagement is not present in the parent, but it is however present in the submodules, and what is more interesting it contains:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.spring.platform</groupId>
            <artifactId>platform-bom</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>

I've never used Spring IO Platform before, so this is a totally new concept for me. As it turns out the platform includes quite a few preconfigured dependencies: http://docs.spring.io/platform/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#appendix-dependency-versions