Pom inheritance and multi-module

Maven assumes that the parent POM is available from the local repository, or available in the parent directory (../pom.xml) of the current project. If neither location is valid this default behavior may be overridden via the relativePath element. For example, some organizations prefer a flat project structure where a parent project's pom.xml isn't in the parent directory of a child project. It might be in a sibling directory to the project. If your child project were in a directory ./project-a and the parent project were in a directory named ./a-parent, you could specify the relative location of parent-a's POM with the following configuration:

<project>
  <parent>
    <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook</groupId>
    <artifactId>a-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <relativePath>../a-parent/pom.xml</relativePath>
  </parent>
  <artifactId>project-a</artifactId>
</project>

To install the parent pom into repository, set package type to be “POM” and run “mvn install”

<project>
  <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook</groupId>
  <artifactId>persistence-deps</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  ...

Another way (multi-module) to have all the dependencies from the pom above is that you can now add this project as a dependency and all of its dependencies will be added to your project. When you declare a dependency on this persistence-deps project, don't forget to specify the dependency type as pom.

<project>
  <description>This is a project requiring JDBC</description>
  ...
  <dependencies>
    ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook</groupId>
      <artifactId>persistence-deps</artifactId>
      <version>1.0</version>
      <type>pom</type>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

It is useful when your project already have one parent (only one parent is allowed). Sometimes it makes more sense to group similar dependencies together and reference a pom dependency. This way, your project can reference as many of these consolidated dependency POMs as it needs.