Maven profiles

We have touched the concept of Maven profiles in a couple of previous chapters, but never went into the details. When do we need Maven profiles and why is it a best practice?

Think about a large-scale multi-module Maven project. One of the best examples I am aware of is the WSO2 Carbon project. If you look at the application POM file available at http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/tags/carbon/3.2.3/components/pom.xml, you will notice that there are more than hundred modules. Also, if you go deeper into each module, you will further notice that there are more modules within them: http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/tags/carbon/3.2.3/components/identity/pom.xml. As a developer of the WSO2 Carbon project, you do not need to build all these modules. In this specific example, different groups of the modules are later aggregated into build multiple products. However, a given product does not need to build all the modules defined in the parent POM file. If you are a developer in a product...