Publishing Artifacts in Ivy or Maven

I'm brand new to Apache Ivy and have posted a few other Ivy-related questions in the last few days because, quite frankly, there's not a whole lot of "gentle" introductory material on it.

I now believe I fully understand the power of these types of dependency resolution tools. There's just one more concept I'm not fully understanding, no matter which article I read, and that is the subject of artifact publishing.

You see, I'm used to JARring up distributables and then copying them to a deployment directory via ant. So, I'm a little confused as to what this "publication" functionality is.

Does "publishing" mean committing to an SCM? Because if all it means is "moving to a 开发者_如何学运维directory" then I just don't see how its any different than ant move command

Thanks for any insight!

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In Ivy, "publishing" an artifact is the same as "deploying" in Maven. It means taking the artifact you've built and uplloading it to a repository somewhere for long-term storage and to make it publicly available. A "published" artifact is very easy to include in any Ivy/Maven project via normal dependency management.

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You should think of publish in terms of sharing artefacts through Ivy repository. If your product consist of few projects, there is always present a dependency tree between your projects. So, underlying projects needs to provide their output to upper projects. It's useful to share a libraries through Ivy. Or you could publish output jars from all project in your product, and later retrieve them in project that builds a distributive. In one product, for example, I used to publish *.msm files (MS installation modules) from multiple projects and later retrieve them in few projects that builds different installers.