What are groupId, artifactId and version?

Together they are the Maven coordinates that uniquely identify your artifact. groupId is a reverse-domain namespace like com.example, artifactId is the project name, and version is the release, often ending in -SNAPSHOT during development to mark it as a mutable pre-release.

Why do Spring Boot dependencies have no version?

The spring-boot-starter-parent supplies a dependency management section (a BOM) that pins compatible versions for every Spring starter and common library. Inheriting from it lets you omit versions on managed dependencies, so they always match your Spring Boot release and never conflict.

What does a starter dependency include?

A Spring Boot starter is a curated bundle of dependencies for a capability. spring-boot-starter-web pulls in Spring MVC, an embedded Tomcat and JSON support, while spring-boot-starter-data-jpa brings Hibernate and Spring Data. You add one starter instead of listing each library by hand.

What is the difference between jar and war packaging?

jar packaging produces a self-contained executable archive, which Spring Boot prefers because it embeds the web server. war packaging produces a web archive meant to be deployed into an external servlet container like Tomcat. Most modern Spring Boot apps use jar.

Why escape XML characters in the values?

Characters like &, have special meaning in XML and would break parsing if placed directly in element text. The tool replaces them with the &, < and > entities so any groupId or artifactId you type produces a well-formed pom.xml.

Maven pom.xml Stub Builder

The Maven pom.xml Stub Builder generates a valid project object model for a Spring Boot application or a plain Java library. Set your coordinates, pick a Java version and the starters you need, and the tool emits a ready-to-build pom.xml.

How it works

Every Maven build is driven by pom.xml. The three coordinates — groupId, artifactId and version — uniquely identify the artifact. For Spring Boot projects the tool inherits from spring-boot-starter-parent, which provides a dependency BOM so your starters need no explicit versions; this is why spring-boot-starter-web and spring-boot-starter-data-jpa appear without a <version> tag. A library project instead pins JUnit Jupiter and the compiler and surefire plugins directly.

The <properties> block sets java.version and maven.compiler.release so the compiler targets the right bytecode level, and the <build> section adds the appropriate plugin — spring-boot-maven-plugin for an executable Spring jar, or the standard compiler and test plugins for a library. Any special XML characters in your input are escaped to keep the document well formed.

Example

After saving the file, build with Maven:

mvn clean package          # compile, test, and package the artifact
mvn spring-boot:run        # run a Spring Boot app directly

Tips and notes

Use -SNAPSHOT versions during active development so Maven treats the build as mutable, and drop the suffix for releases. For Spring Boot, prefer jar packaging — the embedded server makes the artifact self-contained. Run mvn dependency:tree to inspect what the starters actually pull in, and mvn validate to confirm the POM is well formed before committing.

Maven pom.xml Stub Builder

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How it works

Example

Tips and notes